British Lives – serie

John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, was one of the two greatest military commanders in British history and the first subject to achieve and exercise a dominating influence in European affairs. With Wellington and Nelson he is the nearest that Britain has had to a national hero, yet today his reputation has faded. Few, apart from specialists in military history, have any appreciation of the extent of his achievements. This new study sets Marlborough's career in its contexts: the royal Court of the last Stuart monarchs, the desperate struggle against French attempts to establish hegemony in western Europe and the bitter political strife in Britain between the Whig and the Tory parties. It examines the opportunistic ways in which John Churchill rose from obscurity and poverty to wealth and greatness, his decisive role in the Revolution of 1688 and the circumstances and reasons for his dramatic fall.

William Temple (1881-1944) was the outstanding British religious leader of the twentieth century. He believed that the 'modern state' was incomplete without a modern Christian church, which should set the moral and political tone of the community. His political and religious best seller, Christianity and Social Order, which was published as a Penguin Special in 1942, was one of the sources of the wide support for the British welfare state of the 1950s. Temple was the most successful and controversial of British 'priests in politics' because as an Archbishop he combined the idea of national unity rooted in a common set of religious/moral values with a constant demand for political change in the direction of greater social equality. He thus combined conservative and radical impulses to a remarkable degree. This is a study of Temple's public life and policy in Britain, and of his part in the movement to unite the world's Protestant churches.

'There was', Gladstone declared in 1895, 'no life which required so much to be written as that of Disraeli.' Benjamin Disraeli was born in London in 1804, the grandson of an Italian Jew. In this fresh account of his life, Paul Smith looks at Disraeli's unique character as a fuse of Jewishness and Anglicanism, outsider and insider, nationalist and European, Romantic and Tory; and shows how this formed his 'appeal as an original and a card, the most piquant joker in the pack. His indomitable nerve, as a faintly raffish outsider, in scaling the highest peaks of public life, added spice ... to an increasingly unpopular government.'