Biography:William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli were unquestionably leading actors in the drama of British national history. They also, as Richard Aldous points out in this well-written, stylish book, "loathed one another from the beginning".
The Lion and the Unicorn is a detailed, entertaining account of the deep hostility that existed between these two political rivals. Beyond politics, they shared little apart from their dislike for one another. But, rather like heavyweight boxers whose contests come to define a sporting era, so too the individual reputations of these political pugilists came to be bound up with their striking mutual enmity.
They were formidable rivals. Gladstone - "a magnificent actor in the theatre of parliament" - was born in Liverpool in 1809 and had, by the time of his death in 1898, served in office during every decade from the 1830s to the 1890s. He was a famously complicated person: the young Tory MP who later became England's most celebrated Liberal; a man preoccupied with Christianity and with the business of doing God's work, yet also a person tormented by frequent personal and sexual crises; and a figure with an equal capacity to inspire and infuriate to this day.
The eventual Irish obsession of this bookish, four-time UK prime minister is well known, and reflected his tendency towards the couching of political and economic matters in overtly moral terms. As Aldous's book suggests, Gladstone was "a man unable to act without self-justification accompanied by credible public rationalization".
Gladstone's Eton- and Oxford-educated route might seem starkly to contrast with the more unconventional background of his great enemy, Benjamin Disraeli. The latter did not have the humblest of origins ("His father was a successful man of letters"), but he emerges here as a figure whose nervousness and insecurity owed something to the rather eccentric and fashionable experiences of his youth.
Born in London in 1804, he was a creature as ambitious as Gladstone, and as capable of brilliance on occasion. The dual influences of Judaism and Romanticism helped to forge him, as did his youthful inclination towards dandyism and his adoration of the prospect of fame.
Disraeli came to lead the Conservative Party and his was a progressive (though still reasonably orthodox) form of Conservatism. On key public occasions he could prove genuinely extraordinary, mixing the theatrical and the emotional often enough with the scornful and the sarcastic.
Even after his death in 1881 he continued to haunt Gladstone: Aldous indeed suggests that Gladstone's detestation of Disraeli if anything intensified after the death of the latter.
And even long after their deaths, the story of Gladstone and Disraeli remains a dramatic and compelling one of ambition, of revenge and of alternating triumphs and frustrations. As Richard Aldous himself acknowledges, it is a familiar tale, and it is one based largely on well-known material. Moreover, the author is more interested in the stylish narrative of dual lives than in the systematic development of a particular argument about British politics, British history or Britishness as they evolved under the influence of these incompatible competitors. So more, perhaps, could have been said about precisely how the battle between Gladstone and Disraeli actually helped to define the nature of modern Britain. And it would have been fascinating to know in detail what Richard Aldous makes of the lasting legacies of the two men whose lives he knows so well.
But the book remains impressive as an example of high-quality, biographically-centred history writing. In a phrase taken from one of Benjamin Disraeli's own novels, this tale is one of antagonists engaged in a "bustling drama". With his carefully-painted set-piece portraits of the two men, as they bustled and battled with one another, Richard Aldous has set this drama with just the kind of care and skill these two extraordinary adversaries, authors and politicians undoubtedly deserve.
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen's University Belfast, and the author of Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland, just published by Macmillan
The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli By Richard Aldous Hutchinson, 368pp. £20