Gladstone

‘Enough to kill any man’: the trials of serving Queen Victoria

23 March 2024 9:00 am

Of all the Queen’s prime ministers, Gladstone suffered the most from her wilfulness, but while he opposed her policies he did much to popularise her monarchy

Political biographies to enjoy in lockdown

9 May 2020 9:00 am

Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…

Bristol ablaze: anger at the Lords’ rejection of the Second Reform Bill sparked riots in Queen’s Square, Bristol, October 1831 (William James Muller)

Britain über alles

23 September 2017 9:00 am

  David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…

Swagger and squalor

16 September 2017 9:00 am

This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the…

… and an awesome beak

5 August 2017 9:00 am

The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…

Gladstone silences the Irish press for inciting Fenian violence. Cartoon from Punch, 9 April 1890, by John Tenniel

Victorian prime ministers and the press

5 December 2015 9:00 am

Lord Palmerston is remembered today not for his foreign policy nor for his octogenarian philandering, but for his management of…

An Armenian orphan in 1915. Hundreds of thousands of Christian women and children who survived the genocide suffered forced conversion to Islam

At last: a calm, definitive account of the Armenian genocide

18 April 2015 9:00 am

The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi

Clash of the titans

26 October 2013 9:00 am

This is an odd book: interesting, informative, intelligent, but still decidedly odd. It is a history of the Victorian era…

Disraeli, by Douglas Hurd; The Great Rivalry, by Dick Leonard - review

13 July 2013 9:00 am

Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister