Susan Pedersen writes:

'Beloved, let us love so well,/Our work shall still be better for our love,/And still our love be sweeter for our work,/And both, commended for the sake of each,/By all true workers and all lovers born,' Lloyd George wrote, leadenly but perceptively, at the outset of his long affair with Frances Stevenson. He was certainly besotted with her and made her his secretary in order to make her his lover, but it's fair to say that she would not have remained his mistress for nearly thirty years had she not been his secretary too. It was a great convenience for him to have a mistress who was in the next office and also took excellent notes. But if Lloyd George shaped his love to suit his ambitions, so did Stevenson. It isn't that she slept with a man old enough to be her father in order to get ahead (though many women have done so): it’s that she found his power erotic and loved to share it.

Cape | hardback 557 |ISBN: 9780224074643