Disraeli on Ideational Evolution

British television show "Number 10" got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

William Ewart Gladstone ranked second, third or fourth on all five of the lists of the best prime ministers in UK history that are cataloged on Wikipedia, which includes lists compiled by The Times of London and four prominent historians. But as I noted in a blog post last year, Gladstone has never been the subject of a movie, unlike Winston Churchill, who ranks first on all of the lists, and Benjamin Disraeli, who ranks considerably lower. There is however one filmed representation of Gladstone, a fifty-minute episode of a 1983 ITV television series called “Number 10,” named for the home of the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street. This month I managed to find a copy of an NTSC DVD of the series, which I’d struggled to find when I wrote that article. The show presents a character study of seven prime ministers that is unmatched by anything comparable on American television.

Review: The Disraeli myth is consequential but endangered, a new book shows

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing about Benjamin Disraeli as an American, as I do, can be lonely. The 19th century British prime minister and 12-time novelist’s only recent appearance in the American pop consciousness came in a cameo on the animated television show “The Family Guy.” In one of the show’s famous cutaway gags Disraeli turns to the TV audience and intones dolefully “You don’t know who I am.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideational evolution

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who hated to have fun poked at him, has been the subject of jokes and satire for almost 200 years. A prolific novelist in the 19th century whose sales challenged those of his friend Charles Dickens and who was also a member of Parliament and served as Colonial Secretary, he is mostly forgotten today. Everywhere, that is, except this blog, where he has made repeated appearances, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a bad writing competition named for him because he once started a novel with the infamous words “It was a dark and stormy night.” The contest ran for 42 years until last year, when it closed because it took too much work to administer. The famous line has more than once been cited in a “Jeopardy!” question and made immortal by Snoopy, who recurrently begins his own writing attempts with that opening. In his own day, some of the fun poked at Bulwer-Lytton came after he extended his already overlong name from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer to Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton. (His mother had asked him to adopt her maiden name upon her death, and as an unusually devoted son he consented by appending the second instance of “Lytton.”) William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the 1848 novel Vanity Fair, mocked him by naming a character “E.L.B.L.” in a satirical novel, and even went as far in a letter to a Mrs. Bryan Walker Procter to refer to him as “E. L. B. L. B B. L L. B B L B L B L B B.” The initials ran all the way to the end of the margin of the letter and continued on the back side (Harden 200).* Benjamin Disraeli also parodied his friend’s name confusions in the novel Endymion by inventing a character named Bertie Tremaine with a brother inexplicably named Tremaine Bertie, teasing Bulwer-Lytton and his own brother, a successful parliamentarian who retained the surname Bulwer but did not feel the need to append the maiden name Lytton. Disraeli’s novel was also one of the instances in which Bulwer-Lytton was mocked for one of the most interesting things about him: his malleable politics. Both Bertie and Bulwer-Lytton began their careers as left-wing “Radicals” and ended up as ambiguous conservatives in Parliament. The story of Bulwer-Lytton’s transition is not just comedy, but also an interesting tale that is right up the proverbial alley for this blog, which chronicles “ideational evolutions” for multiple figures in history and for the history of ideas itself. Bulwer-Lytton’s evolution is particularly interesting for these purposes because of his influence on the future prime minister Disraeli, and subsequently Disraeli’s impact on him.

Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in Julian

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jed Bartlet, the fictional economist who became president on “The West Wing,” presented a modern fantasy version of Plato’s “philosopher king,” an ideal ruler with a philosopher’s capacity for complex thought and moral wisdom. A hankering for a leader who not only quoted Kant’s soundbites but understood the full context of his intellectual contributions was in the air in the early 2000s, when the TV show aired. In 2008, when we selected Barack Obama, a college professor who went on to annually post a long list of his favorite books and movies like a critic and man of letters, we were looking for a sort of real-life Jed Bartlet. It was said at the time that we were calling back the model of leadership associated with Woodrow Wilson, to this day the only PhD president. We might also have thought of Benjamin Disraeli, the only prolific novelist to be prime minister in Britain (and one who name-dropped Kant in his first novel). The Kant-quoting man-of-letters statesman, in the Trump era, seems like a thing of the past. I felt that loss reading Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel Julian, which is a kind of self-portrait of the artist as an aspiring statesman.

Did Gladstone arrive in Corfu a conservative and leave a liberal?

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“The morning brought us the sight of the grand Acroceraunian range: with brilliant sun & mild air,” wrote William Ewart Gladstone in his diary of November 24, 1858 as he sailed into the Ionian Islands for his strange new job as the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary of the tiny British colonies, an assignment that led to ridicule from enemies and embarrassment from friends. “Then Corfu: which I do not think is like a ῥινόν from the North: but Homer probably meant a mirage.” The footnotes to Gladstone’s diary explain that ῥινόν in The Odyssey is variously translated as “ox-skin, hence shield, or mist, hence, in Gladstone’s view, mirage.” Gladstone was thinking of Odysseus’s trip into what is now the island of Corfu in Book Five of The Odyssey:

Review: Edelman's Disraeli in Love and Disraeli Rising, mismarketed as 1970s romance novels, died an unfortunate death

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1972, the year that The Flame and the Flower launched the sexy historical genre known as the modern “bodice-ripper,” a British MP named Maurice Edelman quietly released an intelligent, campy biographical novel with an unassumingly unsexy cover: Disraeli in Love. The novel quickly sold 400,000 copies in hardcover, perhaps from an audience that skewed male. By the late 1970s the paperback racks of drugstores and airports had been taken over by Harlequin Enterprises and the bodice-ripper. Thus, when Disraeli in Love’s sequel, Disraeli Rising, appeared in 1978,it was packaged like The Flame and the Flower, with a mature Disraeli in a crimson smoking jacket, standing behind a bare-shouldered woman in a black evening dress with his hands seemingly slipping down to her almost-bare bosom. In 1984, Stein & Day followed up with an equally bodice-boasting paperback cover to Disraeli in Love, featuring a younger Disraeli in a dashing dandy’s attire playing tonsil-hockey with a married mistress in a strapless dress.The remarketing of these novels seems to have backfired, however, and the bodice-ripping covers are the last the book saw. Both novels are well out of print. Reviews old or new are scarce online (not one word has been written on Goodreads about Disraeli Rising). The mismatch between intelligent text and sensual mass-marketing may have shrunk the audience for the books and consigned them to a fate worse than the bargain bin.

An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My last piece, on Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Venetia, led me to look into Woodrow Wilson and William Gladstone’s thoughts on the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the subject of that novel. The result inspired a few thoughts on why Disraeli felt the need to “domesticate” Byron and Shelley, as I argued in that essay that he does: A notion of genius which frightened the Victorians but to which Wilson and Gladstone appear to have personally related.

Turning Tory: Disraeli domesticates the scandalous Lord Byron in his novel Venetia

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Benjamin Disraeli, just months from at last becoming a member of parliament after years of trying, finished his novel Venetia in 1837 he sent a copy to his friend William Beckford. He apologized that Beckford had never received his previous novel, Henrietta Temple, admitting “The book was not worth reading.” However, he said, Venetia “is more in our way, tho’ adulterated enough with commonplace, I hope, to be popular.” Disraeli did not say why the new novel was “in our way,” but it likely concerned their common interest in Lord Byron, the famously rakish poet upon whom Disraeli had largely modeled his persona in the first 30 years of his life – and on whose life the novel Venetia is based. The sense in which Disraeli had “adulterated” Byron’s story hinges on a cousin of Byron’s named Mary Chaworth, his childhood companion and lifelong “one that got away.” The great dandy Beau Brummel said he himself had heard Byron “romancing about her for hours.” Byron told a friend that if he had married Chaworth “perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different.” (Both lines are quoted in Ian Gilmour’s 2002 biography The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Own Time.)

Review: Disraeli's Henrietta Temple is not biography, but it would be better if it was

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Having heard that Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel Henrietta Temple: A Love Story was a semiautobiographical telling of his relationship with a woman named Henrietta Sykes between 1833 and 1836, I had long looked forward to reading his account of this open affair with an older, richer, married woman. Such relationships were rare in the annals of literature–and in real life–in his day. But when I opened the book, I discovered it was not a retelling of his relationship with Lady Sykes, but instead yet another Regency novel about an older man in love with a younger, poorer, unmarried woman, in a relationship wherein one or both parties must choose between love and money. We have Jane Austen for that. Naturally Disraeli did not owe his readers accuracy about his sex life, and the mores of the day made it impossible to write about many of the things he would perhaps have loved to write about. But to modern readers the novel would be more interesting if it were more like his fascinating real life.

Review: Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli's almost-lost novel A Year at Hartlebury betrays a statesman's intellectual trajectory

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Benjamin Disraeli is remembered as a formative conservative in the 19th Century, as the longtime head of the Tory party. But there was a time when he could have been a member of the liberal Whig party, RW Davis wrote in his biography of Disraeli in 1976. “There is no reason whatever to believe that Disraeli would have had any objection to entering Parliament under the Whig aegis," Davis wrote. “He had, after all, ridiculed all parties, Tories and Radicals as well as Whigs, without favoritism. And the introduction of the Whig Reform Bill early in 1831, word of which had reached him in Constantinople, he had hailed as ‘wonderful news which … has quite unsettled my mind.’” Disraeli had even written, in 1831, the following in his novel The Young Duke: “Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget.” However, Davis was writing just before 1979, the year that scholars discovered Disraeli had written a novel about his first foray into elective politics in 1832, the same year as the fight over the transformative Reform Bill, which increased the number of men who could vote in England and set the country on the long, long road to democracy. A Year at Hartlebury, or the Election, a novel co-written in 1834 under a pseudonym by Benjamin Disraeli and his sister Sarah, provides both further evidence for Davis’s theory that Disraeli could just as comfortably been a Whig, and evidence of a hostility towards Whigs that undermine that theory.

Review: Disraeli's Alroy prefigures modern Zionism. Did he see himself in the Messianic fantasy?

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Zionism did not yet exist as a political movement in 1833, but future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was already telling a story in which the Jews attempted to reclaim Jerusalem in his novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy. Disraeli’s hero was the historical David Alroy, a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah in the 12th century who won several military victories in an ultimately failed effort to win Jerusalem for the Jews before being murdered by adversaries. In one passage from the book, Alroy comes upon the ruins of a Jewish town in the desert. The narrator, voicing Alroy’s feelings, and perhaps Disraeli’s, marvels:

An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli's conflicting views of Balzac reveal much

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections by politicians on authors of literature and their works are not just trivia. They have a way in some cases of revealing almost more than political writings. Thus this article will glance at the remarks Woodrow Wilson’s family and Benjamin Disraeli made about the novelist Honore de Balzac, about whom I wrote last month. After ruminating on Balzac in my last post because his political novels were a forerunner of Disraeli and the political novel, I thought I might look up what Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone thought of him. Because the results were charming and interesting, I am pausing to share them.

Review: Balzac in Deputy for Arcis attempted to introduce the parliamentary novel before Disraeli

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Benjamin Disraeli has been credited, by Morris Edmund Speare in 1924, with the invention of “the political novel.” This is a dubious claim, as the novel was under development for 2,000 years, according to Margaret Anne Doody, and fictional writings dealt with political and war intrigues early on. Consequently, the critic George Watson suggested amending Disraeli’s achievement to the creation of “the parliamentary novel.” “No nation other than Victorian-Edwardian Britain has ever explored its elective institutions so extensively in fiction,” Watson writes. And in fact even America didn’t really boast a novel on the Washington congressional scene until Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age in 1873. But in May 1839, some five years before Disraeli had conceived his political trilogy, Honore de Balzac was beginning the process of writing a novel, The Deputy for Arcis, that was to analyze in sociological detail the inner workings of the French Chamber of Deputies, or more specifically one rural election for a seat in that chamber. I’m taking a break from reviewing Disraeli’s novels to explore the broader context of the political novel by reviewing that novel.It can be argued that The Deputy for Arcis quietly inaugurated the parliamentary novel before Disraeli with a book that helps show why parliamentary novels have been so rare. Strikingly, the novel demonstrates a surprising affinity not just with Balzac’s famous reactionary “legitimist” politics but with Disraeli’s brand of specifically English Toryism.

Review: Disraeli's novel Contarini Fleming is torn between competing temperaments

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When the title character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1832 novel Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Autobiography returns home from college, his father (based in part on the author’s father, Isaac D’Israeli) listens with pleasure and amusement as Contarini shows off the results of his reading at school. The boy is newly witty and articulate, tossing off pithy observations on philosophy, history and other disciplines. “But when he found that I believed in innate ideas, he thought that my self-delusion began to grow serious,” Contarini narrates. The 27-year-old Disraeli was referencing a philosophical point of view held by Descartes and Plato, that humans are born with certain ideas innately, such as the nature of God, or moral viewpoints. This philosophical position was opposed by some of the great 18th Century Enlightenment masters, including Locke and Voltaire, as its sort of Romantic mysticism was at odds with their empiricism.

Analyzing "Margaret," an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A work of fiction by a future United States president is a rare occurrence, so it’s strange that no one appears to have written anything about an unfinished, six-page short story entitled “Margaret” that Woodrow Wilson wrote in longhand in a notebook, probably sometime in the 1880s. It is now preserved at the Library of Congress. The story was even left out of editor Arthur S. Link’s unprecedentedly exhaustive 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson. The most extensive mention I’ve found is in a brief footnote in Henry Bragdon’s biography of Wilson, which merely notes the story’s existence and quotes a few lines from it. Even Edwin A. Weinstein, who printed an extensive analysis of Wilson’s only completed short story, “The World and John Hart,” in his psychological study of Wilson, ignored “Margaret” altogether. Biographer John Mulder, surveying his early writing, does mention “Margaret” and reminds us that Wilson also once outlined a novel that he never wrote, but then wraps up by noting simply that “Wilson’s failure to get these works published was no loss to American letters.” Of course, it’s possible I missed something, as there are allegedly more than 2,000 books on Wilson in English alone, according to the latest addition to the pile of biographies (Christopher Cox’s 2024 Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn). But the fragment’s complete omission from most of the commonly held biographies in most good libraries is unfortunate, because what it says about this much-examined man and his family is fascinating. I believe “Margaret” to have been inspired by Wilson’s future wife Ellen Axson and her father, who probably committed suicide and whom Wilson appears to see as a symbol of the devastation of the Civil War in the South and the so-called “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.

Review: Disraeli's novel The Young Duke is half fashion and half passion

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Benjamin Disraeli’s narrator in his novel The Young Duke describes the book as “half fashion and half passion.” The meaning of that declaration depends on which edition you read, and if you do happen to be interested in reading this relatively obscure and much maligned but surprisingly entertaining novel, I strongly recommend the 2004 Routledge edition, volume two of six in the series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, which appears never to have been reviewed in any journal or periodical. The Routledge edition is one of the few to print the original 1831 text, rather than reprint Disraeli’s edits from the 1853 edition, which removed in embarrassment all the amusing and revealing autobiographical tangents by the 26-year-old Disraeli’s bubbly and manic narrator. In the original edition, and therefore also the Routledge, these excised effusions constitute the book’s “passionate” half. It’s not clear what Disraeli is supposed to mean in editions where the passionate tangents have been cut. The context is all gone, so it’s anyone’s guess.

Why aren't there any movies starring Gladstone?

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19th Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson’s short-lived 1937 show Mr. Gladstone, which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?

Review: Pelham, a novel by Disraeli's friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m taking a pause from writing about Benjamin Disraeli’s early novels (having reviewed his first, 1826-27’s Vivian Grey, and his 1828 novella Popanilla) to ruminate upon his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1828 novel Pelham: The Adventures of a Gentleman. I take on Pelham now not only because that’s how it fits in chronological order but also because the latter apparently offers insight into the novels to come from Disraeli, and into Disraeli himself. Written when Bulwer-Lytton was 25, Pelham is often described as a manual for the dandy, a category to which both authors belonged. To understand Disraeli one should understand where he stood on the spectrum of dandyism in his early years, and Pelham is an invaluable resource in doing so.

Review: The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, a novella by Benjamin Disraeli

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Panic of 1825, a financial cataclysm caused in part by rampant speculation in Latin American stocks that wiped out many people including a young Benjamin Disraeli. In the three years before the crash, seven nations in South and Central America raised 20 million pounds, of which 19 million of those bonds were in default by 1829. More than 100 British banks closed by the end of 1826, according to recent scholarship (Jackson 2022; see bibliography below). Disraeli and his trading partners lost thousands of pounds investing in South American mining companies, a loss which when combined with his losses thereafter on a failed newspaper venture amounts to millions of dollars today. These events left Disraeli in debt almost to the day he died. He suffered a nervous breakdown after he wrote a sequel to his first novel Vivian Grey, which led him to write a relatively little-remembered 1828 satirical novella called The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, which biographer William Monypenny called the future prime minister’s “first political essay.”

Review: Vivian Grey, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After Benjamin Disraeli had begun to serve in Tory leadership roles in the House of Commons, he complained to a friend in 1853 that the Conservative backbenchers, largely composed of country aristocrats, could not be counted upon to read a book:

“They could not be got to attend to business while the hunting season lasted … they had good natural ability … but wanted culture; they never read, their leisure was passed in field sports … they learned nothing useful, and did not understand the ideas of their own time.” (Source: The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867 by Robert Stewart.)

Review: Endymion, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“How is that your hero should be a Whig?” Queen Victoria asked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in a letter after she finished her two-month project of reading his final novel Endymion in 1880.

Until April of that year Disraeli was the head of the conservative Tory party and therefore in charge of defeating the liberal Whig party. And yet “the whole tone of Endymion is distinctly Whiggish,” as Philip Guedalla wrote in his introduction to a 1926 edition of the book. The lead character is a Tory turned Whig, and many of the most sympathetic supporting characters are Whigs too.

Review: On Lothair and Benjamin Disraeli’s Religious Psychology

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Who was Disraeli really on matters of religion?

Why did former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli write this fairly searching exploration of religious feeling, his second straight novel about a young British aristocrat on a spiritual quest, when in private, to his friends, he was inclined to diss all religions and claim he was incapable of religious belief? Thinking about the answer to this question makes his novel “Lothair” (a huge bestseller in 1870 but often poorly reviewed) entertaining despite the fact that it is not the best, most original or most informative of his novels.

Review: Tancred, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reception to 1847’s “Tancred, Or the New Crusade,” the third of Benjamin Disraeli’s so-called political trilogy, was largely negative until the last 20 years or so. This generation (2004-2024) has produced multiple scholarly treatments that take the book seriously and lift it above the judgment that it is a silly Orientalist travelogue that simply preaches the superiority of the Jewish race in an effort to promote the political prospects of one particular Jew, Disraeli himself.

Review: Sybil, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A forerunner of Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” and other so-called “condition of England” novels in the Victorian age, Benjamin Disraeli’s “Sybil, or The Two Nations” is a groundbreaking novel of ideas and politics. Scholars debate whether Disraeli invented the political novel. By most definitions he did not; for example his own father wrote anti-Jacobin novels about the influence of the French Revolution on England, which influenced Benjamin’s style. But he was certainly the inventor of something original in this blend of uniquely first-hand parliamentary expertise (he was a member of parliament when he wrote it and would go on of course to become Prime Minister), historical essay, proto-Wildean wit and romantic/adventure narrative.

Ideational evolution: an introduction

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At certain moments in history, the ideological changes in a single individual can change the course of history. This blog notes the results of research on a few key examples of those remarkable transitions, specifically the transitions in the thought lives of Woodrow Wilson, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

In April of 1908, Woodrow Wilson suddenly and inexplicably stopped speaking out against the regulation of business and started preaching for it. “No one now advocates the old laisser faire (sic),” he announced, though until that day he had advocated for just that, “or questions the necessity for a firm and comprehensive regulation of business operations in the interest of fair dealing and of a responsible exercise of power.” It was biographer Henry Bragdon who first documented this moment. The transition has been denied by other biographers who claim either that Wilson was always a progressive (Pestritto) or that he was always a conservative (Diamond). But the transformation was dramatic and sudden, as Bragdon tracks it, and leaves behind a mystery: why did he change his mind? How did it affect the course of history?

Review: Coningsby, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In centuries of history very few statesmen have tried to communicate their view of politics through fiction. In the late 18th century, Sweden’s King Gustav III wrote plays and scenarios for operas that today are interpreted as a kind of savvy propaganda. Vaclav Havel wrote plays of consequence both before he was President of the Czech Republic and after, but never tried to use his plays to advance a political agenda in between. In the late 19th century a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of government, made abortive attempts to write short stories, but his were not politically oriented; in fact he used the format to ruminate wistfully about how nice it would be to be an author of fiction. However, later in his career as a professor Wilson renounced (bitterly?) the idea that an aspiring statesman, which he had been since youth, could also write fiction. Look at the novels of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Wilson wrote: the characters in those novels aren’t real people, he said, they are mere “chessmen” just like Disraeli’s subordinates in parliament.

Disraeli on Ideational Evolution

British television show "Number 10" got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone

Review: The Disraeli myth is consequential but endangered, a new book shows

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideational evolution

Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in *Julian*

Did Gladstone arrive in Corfu a conservative and leave a liberal?

Review: Edelman's *Disraeli in Love* and *Disraeli Rising*, mismarketed as 1970s romance novels, died an unfortunate death

An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone

Turning Tory: Disraeli domesticates the scandalous Lord Byron in his novel *Venetia*

Review: Disraeli's *Henrietta Temple* is not biography, but it would be better if it was

Review: Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli's almost-lost novel *A Year at Hartlebury* betrays a statesman's intellectual trajectory

Review: Disraeli's *Alroy* prefigures modern Zionism. Did he see himself in the Messianic fantasy?

An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli's conflicting views of Balzac reveal much

Review: Balzac in *Deputy for Arcis* attempted to introduce the parliamentary novel before Disraeli

Review: Disraeli's novel *Contarini Fleming* is torn between competing temperaments

Analyzing "Margaret," an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson

Review: Disraeli's novel *The Young Duke* is half fashion and half passion