Salisbury

He was Prime Minister for much of the time and also Foreign Secretary, very often holding down the two positions concurrently. In achievement and ability he was at least the equal of Disraeli and Gladstone though less well remembered. In part that was the result of his own aloof and laodicean temperament but it was also the fault of there being no faintly adequate modern biography (his daughter, Lady Gwendolen Cecil wrote a magnificent biography early in the twentieth-century but although in four volumes it only got as far as 1892). At last, in 1999 with the publication of Andrew Roberts' biography this desideratum was filled. Here was the biography of sufficient stature to do justice to the Victorian Titan. Most aptly it went on to win the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. The uniformly outstanding reviews prove why. 'Andrew Roberts has filled one of the great gaps in Victorian