Edwardian

At a time when class-distinctions were still immensely powerful, writes Lucy Masterman, Lloyd George became the first working-class Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Drawing on letters and diaries written when her husband was a close associate of Sir Winston's, Lucy Masterman offers a portrait of him in his early Parliamentary years.

A continuation of Lucy Masterman’s recollections of Sir Winston Churchill as a member of the Liberal Governments before the First World War.

Sailing the North-west Passage around the coasts of the American continent was for long an explorer’s ambition. George Woodcock describes how Amundsen realized it in 1906; Sergeant Larsen, R.C.M.P. in 1942-44.

Chinese labour in South African mines presented a problem to Liberal consciences, writes John Lehmann.

In 1907, writes A.W. Palmer, two empires that had three times been on the verge of war in the preceding thirty years reached a hopeful accommodation.

Peter Stansky & William Abrahams describe how, after Tennyson’s death, the problem of finding a new Poet Laureate perturbed successive British governments.

During the sultry summer of 1911, writes Frank Hardie, a conflict between Commons and Lords presented King George V with one of the most difficult problems of his reign.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Marjorie Sykes, the arrival of migrant labourers, who often visited the same district year after year, was a distinctive feature of English country-life.

Stephen Usherwood recounts the lively reports sent from the goldfields of Yukon by Flora Shaw, the British journalist and writer, which began to appear in English newspapers in August 1898.