The lion and the unicorn - Richard Aldous

William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli were the
fiercest political rivals of the nineteenth
century. Their intense mutual hatred was both
ideologically driven and deeply personal. Their
vitriolic duels, carried out over decades, lend
profound insight into the social and political
currents that dominated Victorian England. To
Disraeli-a legendary dandy descended from
Sephardic Jews-his antagonist was an
"unprincipled maniac" characterized by an
"extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness,
hypocrisy, and superstition." For the
conservative aristocrat Gladstone, his rival was "the Grand Corrupter," whose destruction he
plotted "day and night, week by week, month by
month." In the tradition of Roy Jenkins and A.
N. Wilson, Richard Aldous has written an
outstanding political biography, giving us the
first dual portrait of this intense and
momentous rivalry. Aldous's vivid narrative
style-by turns powerful, witty, and
stirring-brings new life to the Gladstone and
Disraeli story and confirms a perennial truth:
in politics, everything is personal.