Of all the books I've written (and this is the only one), this is by far the best. If you have nothing better to do with your money or time, I highly recommend you add this book to your shopping cart, and get ready for a treat.

This text is a concise guide to the politics of a period dominated by the eponymous statesmen. The two individuals, both originally from the same political party - the Tory or Conservative Party - came to represent markedly opposing positions on the political spectrum, and between them sustained a personal bitterness that enlivened the parliamentary politics of the Mid and High Victorian periods. The Anglican - though Jewish by race, and mindset - Benjamin Disraeli only managed to escape his myriad debts late in life, and always had an eccentric approach to the pressing questions of the day (on being asked on whose side in the great debate on Darwin's recently propounded theory of evolution he stood, Disraeli quipped that he was "on the side of the Angels"). Neverthless, this outsider - who also found the time to be the world's highest paid novelist of his day - came to lead the great party of the establishment. His rival, William Gladstone, came from a wealthy, landed family, was educated at Eton & Oxford, in the bosom of the British ruling classes. Yet this dyed in the wool High Anglican, came to lead a party that was to systematically curtail the rights of the landowning classes and uproot the privileges of the established church in the United Kingdom. Naturally, the book principally focuses upon the High Victorian period of British politics, that is from the passage of the Second Reform Act of 1867, through Gladstone's first ministry (1868-1874) and onto Disraeli's second ministry (1874-1880). Essential information is placed in context by a judicious selection of contemporaneous source material inviting readers to evaluate the record of the two individuals for themselves. If anything, the book's utility is hindered by an overly cautious approach on the part of the author to deliver his own assessment of the history of the period. Happily, the introduction succeeds in placing the men very much in their milieu, and an extensive bibliography gives pointers for readers to pursue their studies of the period & personalities further. The author, a tutor at Brentwood School, Essex, in the United Kingdom, has written a range of intermediate level texts geared for the schools market. This book serves as a benchmark for all attempts to bring to life the struggles, issues and drama of British politics & society in that period.

When my company was acquired by a British corporation in 1996, one of the new managers purchased the original edition in Britain and forwarded it to me. I had read a review in the Economist and was dying to read it, especially after reading a fine biography of Disraeli.

I will admit that it was not the easiest book I have ever read, however I think some of the other reviews quoted here are unjustifiably harsh.

Gladstone was a man of his time and reflected the values and concerns of the Victorian era. Probably, neither Gladstone nor Disraeli would be remotely electable today, and having read excellent biographies of Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, I have begun to truely understand the adage, "the past is another planet."

I believe Roy Jenkins achieved the goal of capturing the essence of Gladstone as it related to the values of his time. Albeit, Jenkins has a very dry, British sense of humor, and that can throw off American readers and made certain passages harder to read for me.

(Incidently, the original British edition had a timeline at the top of the page to make the chronology easier to follow.)

In summary, I feel the this is an eloquent biography that, perhaps, is a little more difficult to read and fully understand. But I believe that is more do to the amazing complexity of the subject than Roy Jenkins' prose.

It took me two years after buying this book to have the courage to begin - its size and detail were daunting. Once I started to read I could scarcely put it down. Roy Jenkins writes smoothly and wittily and his many references to contempory politics bring the nineteenth century Parliament to life. Not far off his eightieth birthday himself, I believe, Jenkins has a lot in common with Gladstone - including his great learning and energy. The parallels between the two are part of the fascination of the book.

Having long been an admirer of Disraeli at the expense of Gladstone, who often is made to appear pompous and puritanical, this reader is now convinced of the greatness of the latter: to be, in the Victorian age, an anti-imperialist, a reformer and pro Home Rule for Ireland was progressive indeed. Gladstone was a magnificent example of the head overcoming the heart. He also had the courage to pursue the convictions resulting from this.

Gladstone was a remarkable, complicated, even enigmatic man and Jenkins does not waste our time with the sort of pop-psychology projection and junk theories that ruin so much contemporary biography. Instead, Jenkins lets the facts speak for themselves, weighting them based on their demonstrable impact on Gladstone's own life and on British society viewed from the vantage point of 100 years or more of subsequent history. Gladstone emerges through records of his actions, the memoirs of his contemporaries, and his own diary. Jenkins resists the too-common modern conceit of pretending intimate knowledge of Gladstone as if through some astral mind-meld. Although he admits his own affection for the man, Jenkins lets readers decide for themselves what they think of this stubborn, courageous, long-winded, sanctimonious, and usually dead right -- even prophetic -- dynamo.

Along the way there are delightful, balanced, spot-on portraits of some of Gladstone's contemporaries. The often-deified Disraeli comes out as a man of great talent, imagination, and political genius who was a self-absorbed, underhanded lightweight. (A portrayal such as that some modern critics have applied to Bill Clinton.) The slow intellectual and emotional curdling of Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert is as eloquent a meditation on the corruptions of isolation and power as I've read in some time. Spencer, Parnell, Hartington, Rosebery, Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, Manning, Wilberforce, Palmerston -- all are here drawn with flavor and economy and no trace of bitterness or partisanship.

One of the great strengths of this biography is that it never talks down to the reader. Jenkins is clearly an almost frighteningly literate individual, and his vocabulary occasionally sent me to the dictionary, but I consulted it in delight as every rare word was clearly used unselfconsciously by an author who knew it well and knew exactly what he was trying to say. (As Simon Winchester has noted, there are very few true synonyms in English.) More challenging in this regard may be the fact that the book, having been written for a British audience, assumes an elementary knowledge of the outlines of British history, which many American readers don't have. Just as a book about a prominent American nineteenth-century figure would not feel it necessary to produce extensive background on, say, the industrial revolution, the transcontinental railroad, or abolition, so Gladstone assumes the reader's familiarity with the Indian Raj, the expansion of the franchise, Britain's own industrial progress, and other subjects. My advice is to just jump right in anyway -- I myself was not well versed in these topics yet found the narrative so strong that the author's insights were easy to follow.

Churchill wrote in 'The History of the English Speaking People' that Gladstone's contemporaries thought that he had no judgement, and that the Conservative Disreali government achieved more in five years than the Liberals (of whom Gladstone was prominant) did in nearly fifty. Churchill was being polite - Gladstone was a pious, pretentious windbag and a collosal hipercrite. He doesn't deserve to have two volumes in this detail writen about him - he never did anything to justify this amount of effort. Even Gladstone's wife said that he was a bore.

Gladstone comes across much like a Kennedy - a mediocrity carried aloft by the wealth of a ratbag father, convinced of his own importance, full of the teachings of the Lord and none of His spirit, only attractive when seen from a distance. His father made a fortune from slave plantations in the West Indies, and Gladstone did little to improve on daddy's efforts. He defended slavery in Parliament while writing pompous sermons about the responsibilities of the church. A mean, miserable specimen who never earnt a penny through his own efforts, he inherited and spent a fortune but went into a lather of shock and horror when discovering that his butler had been pilfering and selling partly used candles from his household. Gladstone never improved on these efforts, but then, considering his papal like view of his own infallibility, he never felt the need to.

Gladstone's younger sister took to dosing herself with opium and wiping her backside with religous tracts. Both behaviours are perfectly understandable for anybody who had to live with a specimen like Gladstone. I think the sister is far more deserving of a biography than the brother.