'Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer ... liked to get away from political anxieties by devouring what he called "shilling shockers": adventure stories, American westerns, and thrillers, though he would occasionally leaven the mixture by rereading Dickens and what he considered the erotic passages of Byron, Milton and Burns. He did latch on to some best-sellers, such as Jeffrey Farnol's The Amateur Gentleman (1913), which he read "over and over again" ...'