Lord Salisbury's World

Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) is now a subject of intense historical attention. But while other scholars have chosen to present biographies of him, this important and accessible new study moves away from the conventional "life" and reconstructs the thought-world of late-Victorian Conservatives for the first time. In doing so it provides a new location within which Victorian politics and Salisbury himself can be evaluated. The book will therefore be essential reading for anyone interested in British political ideas.

This is the first study in over thirty years of the mind and context of arguably the greatest Conservative leader of the nineteenth century
Situates Salisbury in the mainstream of Tory thinking and tradition, and questions conventional assumptions about how Tories viewed their world
Written in an easy, accessible and witty style

Reviews & endorsements

"Successful and stimulating..." British Politics Group Newsletter

"Bentley's study is an extremely successful attempt to analyze what he calls the `Conservative Environments' around and about the Marquis.... Bentley quite rightly remarks that Lord Salisbury was `bitingly intelligent, focused and funny' (p. 6). So is Michael Bentley, who writes in a tellingly ironic yet often elegiac style which reflects an historian completely at home in his period, more than aware of its nuances, and quite prepared to indulge in unwhiggish and trenchant criticism of modernity." Journal of Church and State

"It is shapes in the mind, not in society that concern Bentley, and the result is a somewhat unconventional, sometimes amorphous, but invariably stimulating analysis of the party's most penetrating intellect.... Bentley's book is an important contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of the history of a party formerly derided as stupid, unimaginative, or nonideological.... Specialists will savor it." Choice

"This is a book to savor as a true Tory author revels in the company of the great exemplar of Toryism...Bentley succeeds better than any previous historian in bringing out the calm rationality of Salisbury's response to some of the new movements, such as socialism, from which he recoiled...fascinating..." Albion

See more reviews