The bookshelves of any self-respecting library used to be weighed down with the monographs of the titans of 19th-century politics. The three volumes of John Morley’s masterly Life of Gladstone would jostle for space as each new volume of Moneypenny and Buckle’s six-volume Life of Benjamin Disrael was published. Yet one Victorian politician would have been conspicuous by his absence on the bookshelves.

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