R.J. Minney, British biographer and novelist, has now written a genealogy of the prime ministership, taking No. 10 as the vantage point from which he vies the intriguing progression of men and events.

The story begins in the days when Whitehall lay in marshy fields outside London and continues to be the formation of the Macmillan government. He tells of the construction of the house by George Downing, a graduate of Harvard College in 1642 who returned to England to become an unscrupulous agent for both Commonwealth and Restoration; of the 'indispensable' Walpole and the men who followed: the Pitts, Wellington, Peel, Melbourne, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George and Churchill.