Volume 8, Number 6 · April 6, 1967
Making It
By Noel Annan
Disraeli
by Robert Blake
St. Martin's, 819 pp., $12.50
Namier used to complain that British historians were cursed with a fatal propensity to turn away from history's hard structural analysis to write biographies. It may be so; and, perhaps ironically, the official history of Parliament which is to be Namier's monument is founded upon multitudinous biographies of all known M.P.S. But British historians make uncommonly good biographers, and Robert Blake could argue that no one can write the history of the Tory Party in the nineteenth century without having to form a judgment about the legend of Dizzy. The fascination of this immensely readable book is to see what Blake, who is a don at Christ Church and leader of the conservative cause in the academic politics of Oxford, makes of the legend.
Review, 2224 words
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