The Lion and the Unicorn - Gladstone vs Disraeli

-Engaging and highly entertaining- Sunday Times

The dramatic confrontation between the two ''mighty opposites'' of the Victorian age, brilliantly recreated by a talented young historian.

Gladstone and Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the modern age. Their intense hatred was ideological and deeply personal. Victorian Britain ruled the oceans and vast territories ''on which the sun never set''. The vitriolic duel between Gladstone and Disraeli was nothing less than a battle to lead the richest and most powerful nation on earth.

To Disraeli, his antagonist was an ''unprincipled maniac'' characterised by an ''extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition''. For Gladstone, his rival was ''The Grand Corrupter'' whose destruction he plotted ''day and night, week by week, month by month''. Victorians were electrified by the confrontation. No wonder that when Lewis Carroll''s Through the Looking-Glass <