Reputations – serie

Neville Chamberlain remains one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century British politics. For many years he was admired, even revered, throughout Britain. After serving as Prime Minister, however, Chamberlain left office a reviled and disdained public figure. This book seeks to explain these extremes while offering the author's assessment of what Chamberlain's historical reputation ought to be.

Louis XVI was at the center of the French Revolution, one of the major turning points in world history, but he remains relatively little known, often portrayed only as the weak, lazy, and treasonous king dominated by Marie-Antoinette. This new investigation by John Hardman, a leading expert on the French Revolution, challenges this stereotype. Drawing on new evidence from Louis XVI's letters and from a large body of new research, Hardman provides the first detailed reconstruction of the king's political thought and sheds new light on the king's character and personality. Ideal for students and scholars of modern history, Louis XVI is an important reconsideration of key aspect of the French and a lively introduction to this willfully enigmatic man.

An adventurer and charlatan? A clever rogue? Or perspicacious politician, founder of the modern British Conservative party? These different characterizations have all had their supporters: Disraeli rarely inspired indifference from his contemporaries, and later commentators have often mirrored these divergent evaluations. By the time he at last became Prime Minister, in 1874, he was no longer the exotic, dandified figure who nearly forty years earlier had obtained protection from his creditors by the simple expedient of election to a seat in the House of Commons. But he was still a one-of-a-kind figure in Westminster politics, favorite of his monarch but distrusted or disliked by most of the members of his party. Disraeli was a novelist as well as a politician, and he showed in his political life a novelist's command of the potent image and pregnant phrase. His speeches and writings remain memorable and influential. But any icon is open to manipulation and selective understanding, and Disraeli in particular has been claimed as a spiritual ancestor by an exceptionally diverse group of conservatives.Edgar Feuchtwanger's lively new study does justice to Disraeli's controversial life and ambiguous political legacy, providing a portrait of one of the great personalities of the age as well as shedding light on key political developments of Victorian Britain

There is no shortage of characterizations of Napoleon, but not since Peter Geyl's classic "Napoleon: For and Against in the 1940s" has a writer tried to assess his many reputations and how they have evolved, and continue to evolve. Drawing on the latest scholarship, this is an addition to the "Reputations" series. Alexander treats Napoleon as a universal figure, rather than a specifically French one, and draws from an array of evidence in many media. He focuses particularly on how Napoleon's reputation has been altered by such events as the World Wars and the Cold War, and by association with such figures as Hitler, Santa Anna, Mehemet Ali, and Mussolini.

The construction and deconstruction of Becket's reputation is central to this provocative new study. The cult of Becket has remained enduring: it was the centerpiece of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; and in our own time it has carried powerful enough resonance to generate interpretations from T.S. Eliot, Jean Anouilh, and indeed Hollywood. This book investigates whether the popular conception of Becket through the ages is a result of valid assessments of the man and his cause, or a product of a carefully constructed myth, and how far can one correct for the bias and reach the truth.

This book is not a biography of Margaret Thatcher. It is a study of how her reputation in both the domestic and international sphere was constructed by Thatcher and others over the course of her career. Notably, this is the first scholarly treatment to make full use of the Thatcher Archive, and as a result has comprehensively reassessed and re-evaluated her place in the British political pantheon

Edward IV was the first Yorkist king. He ruled (with only a brief hiatus) for 22 years, ended the Wars of the Roses triumphantly in 1471, and died in his bed not invariably the place of death for a medieval monarch. The best general of his day, he destroyed the House of Lancaster. At a very difficult time, he redeemed royal prestige at home and abroad, restored order and public finances, and crushed all his opponents, including his brother Clarence. His son Edward V, still a minor, succeeded him peacefully. Yet within months Edward was deposed in favour of Richard III, his uncle. The Wars of the Roses resumed, Edward IV's sons met violent deaths, and so at Bosworth Field did the usurping Richard III. Assessment of Edward IV is inextricably bound up not only in the record of his reign, itself much disputed, but also with what turned out to be his baleful legacy. This book explores how his reputation has changed and analyses the major issues in light of contemporary and later perceptions of this controversial king

This book examines Richard Nixon within the context of the emerging revisionism that his place in history should not be defined entirely by Watergate. It assesses his many achievements and explains his equally numerous shortcomings. Nixon himself was assidious in taking advantage of changing perspectives to remodel his shattered image and portray himself as a great leader brought down by one mistake. While most historians resisted this revisionism during his lifetime, a growing number have called for his achievements to be reassessed since his death in 1994. It is time to look again at the Nixon presidency and, without falling into the trap of apologia, try to discern how Nixon's reputation has evolved and how far it corresponds to his actions and their effects. Can we give credence to his self-promotion as 'world statesman'? Should we re-evaluate the domestic record of a president whose policies had more in common with those of his liberal predecessors than his conservative successors? These and other issues that contribute to a fresh understanding of the ways in which Richard Nixon's historical image has been fashioned are at the heart of this incisive new study.