Salisbury: Victorian Titan

Andrew Roberts

Editions

Review

It is strange how unfamiliar Salisbury is.  Other Victorians are so much better known to us - Gladstone and Disraeli, for example - that we forget that it was Salisbury who presided over the British Empire at its zenith.  Three times Prime Minister during his long career, the most powerful man in the world: yet this is the first biography for half a century.

It is also one of the very best biographies of a politician for a generation, partly because it is not just a political biography.  Although Roberts clearly expounds the complex politics, he also brings into the frame Salisbury’s surprising marriage (it was a successful love match), his journalism, and his temperament.  He seeks to understand the man and his age, not to judge.

Presumably Salisbury’s patrician origins and disposition were responsible for his long neglect.  A Tory aristocrat was not a fashionable subject and it has taken an aggressively right-wing historian like Roberts to bring him to our attention.  But the author’s politics are not intrusive.  It was notable that some reviewers who certainly dislike Roberts’s opinions (I remember, in particular, Roy Jenkins) found themselves praising the book warmly. It will stand for a long time as one of the great books about the Victorians - along, I think, with A N Wilson’s God's Funeral pbk £9.99. - review by Johnny de Falbe