"Where another speaker would stretch himself out over an hour and a quarter, Mr. Asquith has said all that is to be said in fifty minutes. It is a miracle of succinctness, the apotheosis of business-like efficiency. There is no gesticulation, no self-abandonment, no flash or glow, but the case is stated, illustrated, argued, and proven with a force that is almost stunning. Further, the Prime Minister is the master of one incomparable art—the result, I imagine, of early practice at the Bar. He can represent the weakest of cases as though it were of overwhelming strength, the most startling of innovations as though it were an everyday procedure, the most disputable of propositions as though it were an axiom of universal acceptance. This combination of gifts, intellectual, personal, rhetorical, renders Mr. Asquith a Parliamentary workman of the highest order."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAcademics from EnglandMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomPeople from Leeds
Original Language: English
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Sources
Lord Curzon, Modern Parliamentary Eloquence: The Rede Lecture, delivered before the University of Cambridge, November 6, 1913 (1914), p. 46
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._H._Asquith
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H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG, PC (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. As Prime Minister, his Liberal Party government passed social legislation beginning the modern British welfare state and reducing the power of the House of Lords. He was the leader of the country during World War I and formed a wartime coalition with the Conservative Party. He was was forced to resign in favor of David Lloyd George
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