Asquith's administration laid the foundation of Britain's welfare state, but he was plunged into a major power struggle with the House of Lords. The budget of 1909 was vetoed by the hereditary upper chamber, and in 1910 Asquith called and won two elections on this constitutional issue. The Lords eventually passed the 1911 Parliament Act, ending their veto of financial legislation. Asquith was Prime Minister on the outbreak of World War I, but his government fell in 1916 as a result of the 'Shells Scandal'.

Part of the Prime Ministers Series, Law was a Conservative who opposed Home rule for Ireland

Born on January 17, 1863, in Manchester, England, David Lloyd George is perhaps best known for his service as prime minister of the United Kingdom during the second half of World War I. While many biographies have chronicled his life and political endeavors, few, if any, have explored how his devotion to democratic doctrines in the Church of Christ shaped his political perspectives and choices both before and during the First World War. In David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction, Jerry L. Gaw bridges this gap in scholarship, showcasing George’s religious roots and their impact on his politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

With a comprehensive narrative that spans more than a century, Gaw’s book ranges beyond typical biography and examines how the work and theology of Alexander Campbell, a founder

of the Stone-Campbell Movement in America, influenced a prominent world leader. George’s twelve diaries and the more than three thousand letters he wrote to his brother between 1886 and 1943 provide the foundation for Gaw’s thorough analysis of George’s beliefs and politics. Taken together, these texts illuminate his lifelong adherence to the Church of Christ in Britain and how his faith, in turn, contributed to his proclivity for championing humanitarian, egalitarian, and popular political policies beginning with the first of his fifty-five years in the British Parliament.

Broadly, Gaw’s study helps us to understand how the Stone-Campbell tradition—and later, Churches of Christ—became contextualized in the British Isles over the course of the nineteenth century. His significant mining of primary materials successively reveals a lesser-known side of David Lloyd George, in large part explaining how he arrived at the political decisions that helped shape history.

In 1905, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey agreed to speak secretly with his French counterparts about sending a British expeditionary force to France in the event of a German attack. Neither Parliament nor the rest of the Cabinet was informed. The Hidden Perspective takes readers back to these tense years leading up to World War I and re-creates the stormy Cabinet meetings in the fall of 1911 when the details of the military conversations were finally revealed.

Using contemporary historical documents, David Owen, himself a former foreign secretary, shows how the foreign office’s underlying belief in Britain’s moral obligation to send troops to the Continent influenced political decision-making and helped create the impression that war was inevitable. Had Britain’s diplomatic and naval strategy been handled more skillfully during these years, Owen contends, the carnage of World War I might have been prevented altogether.

Few figures on the left are as widely heralded as George Orwell. Yet his actual politics are poorly understood. Hope Lies in the Proles corrects that, offering a sympathetic yet critical account of Orwell’s often muddied political thinking and its continued relevance today. John Newsinger takes up various aspects of Orwell’s personal politics, exploring his attempts to change working-class consciousness, considering it alternately romantic, realistic, and patronizing—and at times all three at once. He examines Orwell’s antifascism, and how it fits in with his criticism of the Soviet Union; looks into his relationship with the Labour Party and feminism; and delves into Orwell’s shifting views on the United States. The result is the clearest understanding we’ve ever had of Orwell’s politics and their legacy.

A biography of the Liberal British Prime Minister, 'Who Won the War'.

The Labour party's first Prime Minister