Anyone who has read Dorothy Parker’s devastating review of Margot Asquith’s autobiography may find it difficult to take the subject of this book altogether seriously. As she observed, Margot rubbed shoulders with the great and made sure everyone knew about it. This account of her life in Downing Street, as the wife of Herbert (Henry) Asquith, is a rather more sympathetic study of a woman who lived at the heart of events in an extraordinary age, but it’s an oddity all the same. It focuses on the period 1912-1916, when Asquith was Prime Minister, which means that a book that plainly should have been a life of Margot Asquith ends up dealing only briskly with her earlier life – a waste for someone who was Gladstone’s pet and had Oscar Wilde’s story “S