Böcker av Richard Aldous

An iconic friendship, an uneasy alliance a revisionist account of the couple who ended the Cold War.

Douglas Dillon advocated for evolution and reform over radicalism and placed the national interest above party interest. With exclusive access to the family's archive, in The Dillon Era Richard Aldous sets fresh eyes on a well-documented period in American history, unfolding a deeply influential but somewhat overlooked political career.

William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the nineteenth century. Their intense mutual hatred was both ideologically driven and deeply personal. Their vitriolic duels, carried out over decades, lend profound insight into the social and political currents that dominated Victorian England. To Disraeli-a legendary dandy descended from Sephardic Jews-his antagonist was an "unprincipled maniac" characterized by an "extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and superstition." For the conservative aristocrat Gladstone, his rival was "the Grand Corrupter," whose destruction he plotted "day and night, week by week, month by month." In the tradition of Roy Jenkins and A. N. Wilson, Richard Aldous has written an outstanding political biography, giving us the first dual portrait of this intense and momentous rivalry. Aldous's vivid narrative style-by turns powerful, witty, and stirring-brings new life to the Gladstone and Disraeli story and confirms a perennial truth: in politics, everything is personal.

In this authorised biography of one of the most remarkable Irishmen of the twentieth century, Richard Aldous is independent in his judgements and frank in his examination of his subject's shortcomings and eccentricities. But most of all, he writes with verve and pace.

'Engaging and highly entertaining' Sunday Times The dramatic confrontation between the two 'mighty opposites' of the Victorian age, brilliantly recreated by a talented young historian. Gladstone and Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the modern age.