June 1914.The social and political leaders of the greatest Empire in the history of the world gather at Buckingham Palace in the presence of King George V and his wife, Queen Mary.Their glittering, complacent world seems strangely immune from the climacteric of destructive forces that threatens it.In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants prepare to cut each other's throats;in England, Suffragettes and Trade Unionists alike see violence as their only weapon;and in Europe hostile nations, locked into an arms race, talk of the glories of war. For the moment, the fabric holds - a bizarre parallel with the private life of Cabinet Minister Walter Ransom, whose contentment seems equally threatened by a failed marriage, a mysterious, volatile mistress who has apparently betrayed him, and a political career which, at the age of 43, has left him only with a deep sense of failure and inadequacy. In a dramatic twist to the account historians of the First World War have given for a century, Prime Minister Asquith sends Ransom to the Germany of the Kaiser Wilhelm 11, where he is offered an escape of an incredible kind: kill his King, kill King George, and live for ever in history. In the midst of the brilliant social life of Royal Ascot and the Ritz, the parties of Prince Lichnowsky and Margot Asquith, and the delights of the Kiel Regatta, the politicians of Europe work out a tangle of ambitions in the pursuit of power.As the King calls a Constitutional Conference on Ireland to try to halt the tide of Civil War that threatens to engulf his country, the Kaiser's own plans plunge on towards their fruition, and one man - Walter Ransom - all his aspirations dead, is left with