1886-1895
The Home Rule crisis
Shortly after Gladstone’s second government had seen the third reform act safely onto the statute book in 1885, it suffered a defeat on the budget and resigned. Lord Salisbury formed a minority Conservative government that called an election when the new enlarged electoral register was ready.
John Atkinson Hobson, 1858-1940
John Atkinson Hobson, the economic writer and radical journalist most associated (along with L. T. Hobhouse) with Edwardian New Liberalism was born in Derby on 6 July 1858, the second son of William and Josephine (ne Atkinson) Hobson. William Hobson was the proprietor of the Derbyshire Advertiser, to which his son later contributed, and was…
‘He would not stoop, he did not conquer’
Review of Robert Rhodes James, Rosebery (Phoenix, 1995).
The legacy of Gladstone
The Grand Old Man’s record.
A lost Prime Minister?
Biography of Sir Arthur Herbert Dyke Acland (1847-1926).
From left to right? The career of John Morley
Biography of John Morley (1838-1923), the leading Victorian and Edwardian Liberal who could be seen as both of the left and the right.
Rainbow Circle
The Rainbow Circle was a dining club which comprised a group of progressive politicians who met between 1894-1920.
Graham Wallas, 1858-1932
Graham Wallas was born in Sunderland on 31 May 1858, the son of an Evangelical clergyman of the Church of England who later became Rector of Shobrooke in Devon, where the young Wallas was brought up. He went to public school at Shrewsbury and thence to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read Greats. Wallas…
William Ewart Gladstone, 1809-1898
As Roy Jenkins concluded in his masterly biography, ‘Mr Gladstone was almost as much the epitome of the Victorian age as the great Queen herself’. He was the political giant of his lifetime and even at the end of the twentieth century the principles and aspirations he brought to public life are still inherent in the…