Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain

by Michael Bentley

Overview

Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) is now a subject of intense historical attention. But while other scholars have chosen to present biographies of him, this important and accessible new study moves away from the conventional "life" and reconstructs the thought-world of late-Victorian Conservatives for the first time. In doing so it provides a new location within which Victorian politics and Salisbury himself can be evaluated. The book will therefore be essential reading for anyone interested in British political ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521445061
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/06/2001
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.02(d)
Lexile:	1540L (what's this?)

About the Author

Michael Bentley has been Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews since
1995. He is the author of a well-known volume in the Fontana History of England (Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914) and of several studies of Liberal politics in Britain. In 1993 he was editor of Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, Cambridge University Press (0521400139). He is a regular reviewer, and teaches over a wide range of issues, from intellectual history to historical theory. He is currently Programme Chair of the International Commission on Historiography.

Table of Contents

Introduction: situations vacant; 1. Time; 2. Space; 3. Society; 4. Property; 5. Thought; 6. The state; 7. The church; 8. The empire; 9. The party; 10. The legacy; Note on sources.

Editorial Reviews

"Successful and stimulating..." British Politics Group Newsletter

"Bentley's study is an extremely successful attempt to analyze what he calls the ‘Conservative Environments' around and about the Marquis.... Bentley quite rightly remarks that Lord Salisbury was ‘bitingly intelligent, focused and funny' (p. 6). So is Michael Bentley, who writes in a tellingly ironic yet often elegiac style which reflects an historian completely at home in his period, more than aware of its nuances, and quite prepared to indulge in unwhiggish and trenchant criticism of modernity." Journal of Church and State

"It is shapes in the mind, not in society that concern Bentley, and the result is a somewhat unconventional, sometimes amorphous, but invariably stimulating analysis of the party's most penetrating intellect.... Bentley's book is an important contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of the history of a party formerly derided as stupid, unimaginative, or nonideological.... Specialists will savor it." Choice

"This is a book to savor as a true Tory author revels in the company of the great exemplar of Toryism...Bentley succeeds better than any previous historian in bringing out the calm rationality of Salisbury's response to some of the new movements, such as socialism, from which he recoiled...fascinating..." Albion

From the Publisher