You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The life of one of the greatest British Prime Ministers - by an author who knows the scene from his years as a senior Minister in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet. Robert Peel (1788-1850), as much as any man in the nineteenth century, transformed Great Britain into a modern nation. He invented our police force, which became a model for the world. He steered through the Bill which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament. He reorganised the criminal justice system. Above all he tackled poverty by repealing the Corn Laws. Thanks to Peel the most powerful trading nation chose free trade and opened the door for our globalised world of today. Peel was not all politics. He built two great houses, filled ...
Drawing on the conclusions of recent research, this book takes a more critical view of Peel's political career than is conventionally offered. It argues that, although Peel was an efficient administrator and a dominant political leader in the 1830s and 1840s, he lacked both intellectual flexibility and political sensitivity. His arrogance and inflexibility rather than the inadequacies of his backbenchers, were largely responsible for the break-up of the Conservative party in 1846 and for its generation in the political wilderness thereafter. Completing the trilogy of Great Victorian Prime Ministers in the Lancaster Pamphlet series, Professor Evans's reassessment of Peel's career sheds light both on a major political figure and, more widely, on party politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Sir Robert Peel provides an accessible and concise introduction to the life and career of one of the most political leaders of the nineteenth century. Perhaps best known for seeing through the Repeal of the Corn Laws, Peel had an enormous impact on political life of his age and beyond. Eric J. Evans reassesses Peel's career, arguing that although Peel's executive and administrative strengths were great, his arrogance, lack of empathy with the development of political parties and his inflexible commitment to economic liberalism presented political problems which he was incapable of solving. This expanded and fully revised second edition: fully engages with the extensive new historical work on Sir Robert Peel published since the first edition appeared fifteen years ago includes a glossary of key terms plus an updated and expanded bibliography, including listing useful websites. Sir Robert Peel is the perfect introduction for all students of nineteenth-century history.
Norman Gash's magnificent two-volume life of Sir Robert Peel - Mr Secretary Peel (1961) and Sir Robert Peel (1972) - is the standard work on the great statesman, and is widely considered one of the great biographies of 19th-century prime ministers. Faber Finds is delighted to return both to print, beginning with Mr Secretary Peel. As Gash puts it memorably, 'Peel, born in 1788 in the world of Gibbon and Joshua Reynolds, of stage-coaches, highwaymen and the judicial burning of women, died in 1850 in the age of Faraday and Darwin, of Punch, railway excursions, trade unions and income tax...' Over the course of Peel's life Britain was remodeled, and it may be argued that Peel himself did more t...
Norman Gash's magnificent two-volume life of Sir Robert Peel - Mr Secretary Peel (1961) and Sir Robert Peel (1972) - is the standard work on the great statesman, and is widely considered one of the great biographies of nineteenth-century prime ministers. Faber Finds is delighted to return both to print. In this second volume, Gash focuses on the years between 1830 and 1850, the height of Peel's political career, which included his two terms as prime minister, the controversial repeal of the Corn Laws, and his reform of the Conservative Party. 'In ... his masterly biography, covering Peel's career from the Reform Crisis to his untimely death in 1850, Professor Gash shows himself not merely an...
None