Lord Palmerston

£20.00

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Introduction by John Letts

214 pages

Out of stock

This memoir by Trollope, written between November 1881 and February 1882, the last year of the author’s life, offers the modern reader a vivid impression of Palmerston’s character and career. Fascinatingly the man is revealed as possessing most of the characeristics of a typical Trollope character from the author’s novels: indeed Plantaganet Palliser had already been given many of Palmerston’s attributes, particularly his stubbornness, his doggedness, and his diligence. Palmerston emerges as thick-skinned, an occasionally brilliant speaker, and playing a straight bat in his politics.

Trollope’s sympathies are clearly with his subject, but he uses the work to put forward his own opinions; in some ways this memoir is an account of the author’s own times. The Athenaeum called the book ‘a Liberal confession of faith’. Like his book on Cicero, this was a labour of love, a tribute to one of his heroes, and an already fading snapshot of a fast-disappearing era.