Robert Stewart is the author of two books on the early history of the Conservative Party, The Politics of Protection and The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867, and of a life of Henry Brougham.
A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and constitutional history.
Only in the imagination of the authors of 1066 and All That was there ever a custom of executing public men ‘for being left over from the last reign’. Had such a custom prevailed...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.