A Welshman among the English, a nonconformist among Anglicans and a self-made man in the patrician corridors of power, David Lloyd George, the last Liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain, was the founding father of the Welfare State and was as great a peacetime leader as Churchill was in war. In this fascinating biography of an authentic radical, Roy Hattersley charts the great reforms - the first old age pension, sick pay and unemployment benefit - of which Lloyd George was architect, and also sheds light on the complexities of a man who was both a tireless champion of the poor, and a restless philanderer who was addicted to living dangerously.

'Lloyd George at War, 1916-1918' refutes the traditional view that Lloyd George was the person most responsible for winning the Great War. Cassar's careful analysis shows that while his work on the home front was on the whole good, he was an abysmal failure as a strategist and nearly cost Britain the war.

Was the First World War really 'For King and Country'? This is the first full history of the monarchy's role.

The TUC Overseas (1986) traces the decisions made by the Trades Union Congress in response to domestic and external influences and events, from its establishment of a joint international committee with the Labour Party in 1917 to the first congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1945. In this crucial period the TUC played a part in the establishment of the International Labour Organization and in the reconstitution of the International Federation of Trade Unions and the Labour and Socialist International after the Great War, in the rivalry with the Communist International and the Red International of Labour Unions, and in the reunification of the international trade union movement in the final years of the Second World War. This international framework and the Labour Party’s imperial policy are treated here in relation to the TUC’s work first in India and then in the colonies.

“A tour de force of scholarship, analysis and narration.… Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War.” —Lawrence James, Times The Telegraph • Best Books of the Year The Times of London • Best Books of the Year A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II—soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals—lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu. As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was a simmering, dynamic “cauldron of war” defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war. Brimming with vivid detail and insight, The Western Front is a work in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan, Rick Atkinson and Antony Beevor: an authoritative portrait of modern warfare and its far-reaching human and historical consequences.

When Lloyd George became Prime Minister during the First World War he appointed a private secretariat to help him run the complex machinery of wartime government. This book, drawing extensively on private and public archives, describes the work of that Secretariat during its two years of existence and discusses its contribution to policy-making and to the development of the Prime Minister's office. The 'Garden Suburb', so named from its temporary offices in the garden of 10 Downing Street, has won a poor reputation. Contemporaries described it as a nest of intrigue and imperialist, anti-democratic sentiment which helped to turn Lloyd George from a great Radical into a cynical dictator; and historians have tended to accept their word. This examination reveals a different picture. On the one hand, wartime government was imperfectly co-ordinated, and members of the Secretariat performed a genuine administrative task in helping Lloyd George to supervise it and save it from breakdown, although their small number and limited resources allowed them to cover only a few politically sensitive questions. On the other hand, the Garden Suburb was more eclectic in its ideological and political affiliations than has been allowed. Home Rule, collective security, temperance, state supervision of industry, Christian Science and the revival of agriculture, as well as imperial unity and opposition to socialism, each contributed through the Secretariat to the climate of ideas in which policy was made.