Surely few people have had so many biographies as Disraeli; and they keep coming, one after another. Is it because, in the turbid wake of Thatcherism, he represents an intelligent and flexible conservatism, the kind of patrician democracy which now seems to be irrevocably a thing of the past? In some ways Disraeli was profoundly un English he and Bismarck established a close relationship based on mutual respect yet he loved English life and politics, had an English wife, and was a favourite of Victoria, who correspondingly detested his great rival Gladstone. (Yet on his death bed he had the courage to refuse to see the Queen: "She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.")