Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Balfour: The Last Grandee

All passion spent

R. J. Q. Adams
John Murray, 479pp, £30,

Philip Ziegler

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Philip Ziegler

Sargent’s portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked the middle-class touch, he lacked even the upper-middle-class touch. He would have viewed the Forsytes with mild disdain; the rich industrialists of the Midlands and North, who every year played a more significant role in Conservative affairs, were an alien breed. He was happy to sit in Cabinet with Joseph Chamberlain; he would, if necessary, have been prepared to serve under him, but he never thought of him as a friend, let alone an intimate. Wit, intellectual finesse, aesthetic sensibility, were all of the first importance: he would not have claimed that such qualities were invariably associated with aristocratic lineage, but he must have felt that remarkably often this would prove to be the case.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

The power of the evasive word

Michael Howard

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.