Salisbury: Victorian Titan (Phoenix Press)

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Andrew Roberts

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Pages: 960 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0753810913

Pub: Phoenix

Pub date: 2000-11-02

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 46376

Editorial Review:

Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) was a heavyweight Victorian politician in every sense of the word. Clocking the scales at 18 stone, the owner of a 20,000 acre landed estate at Hatfield and the writer of some two million words of political journalism, he combined the offices of Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister for 12 years at the close of the 19th century, presiding over the expansion of the British Empire overseas and the electoral dominance of the Conservative Party at home. Yet until now Lord Salisbury has been poorly served by biographers. Next to the flamboyant Disraeli and the mercurial Gladstone he is perhaps a less compelling subject, but his impact on Victorian politics and foreign policy was no less decisive. Andrew Roberts' bumper biography goes a long way to restoring Salisbury to his rightful place in the pantheon of great prime ministers. Roberts, whose earlier work has earned him the reputation as a right- wing revisionist, wears his politics lightly in this volume, weaving together a full and complex narrative in an accurate and scholarly fashion. He finds room for everything. The major set-pieces of diplomacy, rivalry with Disraeli, parliamentary reform, Home Rule and the modernisation of the Conservative Party are all there, but so too are fascinating glimpses of Salisbury's happy home life, his tinkering with science and technology and, throughout, a proper appreciation of his political journalism--"Toryism for the clever man". --Miles Taylor

Reader Reviews:

The highest of high Tories (0/0 people found this helpful)

This is Roberts's masterwork, nearly 850 pages every one of which holds the attention. Salisbury was an even greater influence on the Conservative party than Disraeli, and Andrew Roberts shows in this portrait of a political giant why this is so. Apart from the portrait, it is a lucid account of politics and European affairs over the critical second half of the nineteenth century, out of which the terrible twentieth was formed.

An sympathetic study of a neglected political giant (10/10 people found this helpful)

The sheer size of Andrew Roberts' weighty tome might suggest that it consists of a considerable amount of useless information leavened with the occassional anecdote, written in a dry and academic style. Not so. Roberts presents the facts in a clear, entertaining manner which leaves the reader thankful that Salisbury has fianlly got the biographer he deserves. Salisbury's life and achievements are dealt with in exhaustive detail, and Roberts' character sketches of the other major players of the period - Bismarck, Disraeli, Gladstone et al - are hugely informative and entertaining.
It is clear that years of scholarship have gone into this biography. Contemporary sources and letters litter each chapter, allowing an insight into Salisbury's character and views on policy, as well as giving the reader the benefit of the phlegmatic politician's witty and concise style of writing. These sources come in particularly handy in the chapters dealing with Salisbury's foreign policy and his attitude to foreign powers, particularly Bismarckian Germany.
It is interesting to wonder what the most accomplished foreign minister in British history would think were he able to analyse Britain's current situation in the world. On finishing this book it is sobering to reflect on the past acheivements of an age now long in the past, and it might just be possible that some of Salisbury's methods might still be relevent in the 21st century.

Fine biog of ruthless empire-builder (6/11 people found this helpful)

Andrew Roberts has produced a superbly written and wonderfully exciting biography of Lord Salisbury, three times Queen Victoria's Prime Minister. In his fifty-year career, Salisbury won over Disraeli, destroyed Lord Randolph Churchill, charmed Queen Victoria, wrecked Gladstone's hopes for Irish Home Rule, and saw off Bismarck. The book is based on Salisbury's archive at Hatfield House, and on the papers of more than 140 of his contemporaries.

Roberts records Salisbury's many contradictions. He supported "the right of a minority of Americans to secede from a Union, but not a majority of Irishmen." He opposed socialism as mere confiscation, but upheld the actions of his ancestor, the First Earl, who had confiscated much of Ulster's land between 1607 and 1609, then selling it to City and Scottish businessmen.

He wrote eloquently against intervention in other countries' domestic affairs. "The Assemblies that meet at Westminster have no jurisdiction over the affairs of other nations. Neither they nor the Executive, except in plain defiance of international law, can interfere with the brigandage of Italy, or the persecutions in Spain, or the teachings of the schools in Schleswig-Holstein. What is said in either House about them is simply impertinence ... It is not a dignified position for a Great Power to occupy, to be pointed out as the busybody of Christendom." And, "there is no practice which the experience of nations more uniformly condemns, and none which governments more consistently pursue."

Indeed, his Governments annually waged colonial wars in Asia and Africa, adding 2.5 million square miles and 44 million people to the Empire. His war against the Boers was particularly shameful: he claimed that Britain had sovereignty over the Transvaal, although the British Government had ceded this in the 1884 Pretoria Convention. (Roberts grants that Salisbury was 'on exceedingly tricky ground legally'.) As Salisbury admitted, "If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other peoples, the British Empire would never have been made."

This Way For Superb English Prose (7/7 people found this helpful)

Apropos of P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh once wrote that 'One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.' This just assessment of Wodehouse's analogical inventiveness comes to mind in reading Andrew Robert's biography of Salisbury, for, as Roberts' quotations amply demonstrate, Salibury was himself a master of analogy. Go to the index of Roberts' brilliant book and you can see for yourself his fecundity in this line under the 'views and opinions' entry. Here are some of my favorites: 'Colonial governorships,' he writes, should be looked on as 'convenient almshouses in which political incapables can be cheaply boarded and lodged.' And elsewhere he says, 'The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies. When a mast falls overboard, you do not try to save a rope here and a spar there, in memory of its former utility; you cut away the hamper altogether.' These and scores of other apt analogies splendidly substantiate Lord George Hamilton's claim that Salisbury was indeed 'the greatest master of compact and expressive language in politics.'

Interesting work about a typical victorian statesman (1/3 people found this helpful)

It a interesting work about a neglected and forgotten statesman. Andrew Roberts wrote this book in a very interesting way, with some minor incorrections (Marquis of Soveral was not Prime Minister of Portugal at the Ultimatun of 1890.), nevertheless on the whole it is an interesting book, that brings some light about this relatively unknown statesman. I recomend that this book should be read for a better understanding of "English" and world history of the late XIXth century and early XXth century.

One odd thing, nevertheless is the obession with the Churchills, Lord Randolhp and Sir Winston Churchill, I do not understang you the author seems to find all available way to critcise Lord Randolph...

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