Consider the rubicund, tired portraits of Field Marshal Lord French, 1st Earl of Ypres by John Singer Sergeant, or the earlier image of the walrus-moustached here of the Siege of Kimberley; then remember that this stuffed, this villain of Oh! What a Lovely War, had a mistress. It doesn't seem possible. In investigating the amours of three extraordinary women - Winifred Bennett (lover of Sir John), Emilie Grigsby and Sylvia Henley - author Jonathan Walker provides us with an entirely new and astonishing perspective on British leaders in the Great War. It puts flesh on the bones of 'the hollow men, the stuffed men'. The aristocratic Sylvia Henley stepped into her sister Venetia's shoes after her marriage in 1915 as confidante to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. As the British suffered 400,000 casualties at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, who is the first person he writes to about the awful offensive? Sylvia. The American adventuress Emilie Grigsby was the lover of Sir John Stevens Cowans, the Quartermaster General, The Times military correspondent, and Rupert Brooke. Using contemporary diaries, letters and intelligence reports, Power and Passion exposes the realities of London society whilst men died in France and how these women, through their lovers, affected the course of the war.

JONATHAN WALKER is a member of the British Commission for Military History and a former Honorary Research Associate at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of five books for Spellmount: The Blood Tub: General Gough and the Battle of Bullecourt; War Letters to a Wife (as editor); Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia; Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944 (which has been translated into Polish to great acclaim); and The Blue Beast: Power and Passion in the Great War. In addition to contributing to other recent military history publications, he has appeared on BBC radio and television programmes. He lives
in Devon.