The tenth and eleventh volumes of Gladstone's diaries (1881-1886) cover the years of his dramatic second and third administrations. The second administration confronted a series of crises: the Land League Campaign and the Phoenix Park murders, Majuba Hill and South Africa, Gordon and the Sudan, and the obstruction of franchise reform by the House of Lords. The administration met these with determined assertion of administrative and legislative reforms, more coherent in policy and more consistent in practice than is often realized. Gladstone's third administration in 1886 attempted to pacify Ireland by granting Home Rule and in doing so provided one of the most exciting and controversial twelve months in British politics since the Civil War. These volumes include not only the daily text of Gladstone's private diaries (maintained almost without a break) but also all of his Cabinet Minutes, hitherto unpublished and themselves a remarkable, and for the Victorian period, unique diary of decision-making. There are over 1400 of the letters (the vast majority hitherto unpublished) which he wrote in those years. These letters flesh out the daily diary and the Cabinet Minutes, and cover the Church, the Queen and the Court, literature, theatre, art, and domestic affairs. There is much material in these volumes on Gladstone's unsuccessful but repeated attempts to retire from political office. The volumes offer an extraordinary narrative of great force, a remarkable mixture of achievement and disappointment, of bold legislation and administrative and political disasters. They display some of the innermost thoughts of an astonishing political personality which mesmerized contemporaries and has continued to fascinate historians and general readers.

William Gladstone The Grand Old Man of 19th century politics was Prime Minister four times. Throughout his life, women, from Queen Victoria through to prostitutes, were of great importance to him. This book talks about Gladstone and shows that his most no

A new survey of Gladstone's life and career, placing him firmly in the context of nineteenth-century Britain, and covering both his intriguing private life and his public career.

Splendid Isolation? is at once a portrait of British politics and diplomacy at the height of British power and a revisionist account of the First World War. John Charmley argues a powerful and challenging case, forcing a fresh look at a period long held to be part of the glorious British past.

In Fantasy and Reality in History, Peter Loewenberg brings what the discipline of psychoanalysis has learned about human conduct and the irrational to bear on the analysis and writing of history. The result is a remarkable series of studies on individual and social anxiety, racism and nationalism, and crisis management. First examining early twentieth century Zürich and the first practitioners of psychoanalysis--Freud, C.G. Jung, Karl Abraham, and others--to establish the discipline's understanding of the unconscious and how it functions, Loewenberg then explores the tensions in the lives and politics of modern political leaders. The great British Liberal Prime Minister Walther Rathenau, and the Russian fascist demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky are among those studied. In each of these interconnected essays, Fantasy and Reality in History makes readily evident the advantages, and unique insights, that psychoanalytical techniques can provide in the examination of history. Loewenberg's blend of clinical and historico-political methods not only produces new exciting research, but demonstrates how it is done.

Through close examinations of diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, this book explores how the diary's construction of time and space made it an invaluable and effective vehicle for the dominant discourses of the period; it also explains how the genre evolved into the feminine, emotive, private form we continue to privilege today.

The title of the book reflects the fact that throughout his ministerial career, as home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer under Gladstone, Harcourt was supported by his son Lewis ("Loulou"), who acted as private secretary and confidential advisor, and whose unpublished journals were one of the main sources for the book. The author also made extensive use of other contemporary diaries (particularly those of John Morley, only recently made accessible) and thousands of manuscript letters to and from Harcourt."--Jacket.

A history of an important newspaper and of Jewish communal life, interpreted through its most vibrant public voice.