Lloyd George

"I think what is special about this biography is John Grigg himself. He was the son of Edward Grigg, an eminent figure in Britain in World War II, who was in Churchill’s wartime government. John Grigg went on to forsake his own membership of the House of Lords when his father died. He was an important figure himself in politics. He was a prominent critic of the Suez Crisis. He had this real insider’s understanding of politics, which is what makes him such a good biographer. He also wrote very elegantly. He managed to be a great literary biographer. I think the insight into the politics of the period around Lloyd George and the quality of his own writing. He won the Whitbread Award for the second volume and he won the Wolfson Prize for the third. He was this combination of someone who grew up with politics at a very early age in the world of his father and then in his own right. He used all that understanding to write extraordinary biographies in a very polished and fine style. I think it shows his humanity. The closer you get to people the more you realise that simplistic judgments are naive."