Machin, Disraeli

Abstract

Jan Machin, Professor of British History at the University of Dundee, offers his discerning study of Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield. There are no astonishing novelties, but Machin has written a political biography that bears the mark of solid research and consistency of treatment. Thus we receive the view of Disraeli as a pragmatist reveling to climb the greasy pole of politics, and who is no ideologue where flexibility and ambition will better assure the rise to power and the keeping of it. Machin blends chronology and commentary in a tight but lucid narrative, an excellent treatment of Disraeli and his career. Among the virtues of Machin's work are its witness to the powers of compromise and alliance in politics, and instruction by inference about the system of constitutional government in Britain during a time of transformation.