Yes, among my creditors, I shall have disciplined that diplomatic ability, that shall some day confound and control cabinets.” It is a shame that Ridley does not explain the system of selling debts, or the principles of the Corn Law agitation, background that may not be familiar to the general reader. One of his fictional characters admits as much: “All my knowledge of human nature is owing to them: it is in managing my affairs that I have sounded the depths of the human heart.. What expedient in negotiation is unknown to me? … Disraeli’s financial diffi- culties were a real obstacle to his political career, preventing him from appearing in public to avoid the humiliation of arrest; on one occasion, he escaped the bailiff only by jumping down a well.But Jane Ridley shows how debt taught Disraeli to treat his friends ruthlessly, a lesson valuable to a politician. As he rescheduled the debts, apparently at ever higher rates of interest, they mounted inexorably. When he stood for parliament at Shrewsbury in 1841, a handbill listing debts of more than £22,000 was distributed, claiming that Disraeli “seeks a place in parliament merely for the purpose of avoiding the necessity of a prison”. Disraeli loved her, too, in his way; he needed someone to fuss over him. What Mary Anne lacked he made up for in a series of passionate intellectual friendships with young aristocrats.Disraeli’s debts were enormous By the time he was 21, he had already lost a fortune.

This book stands on its own strengths; in particular, rescuing the reputation of Disraeli’s wife Mary Anne, much ridiculed by male biographers. Mary Anne admitted she was a “dunce” by comparison with her adored “Dizzy”, but Jane Ridley shows how much of his success he owed to her shrewdness and her devotion. Ridley claims that the publication of Disraeli’s letters in a definitive edition by the University of Toronto Press has transformed the study of Disraeli No such justification is necessary. Since Robert Blake’s standard biography in 1966, there have been two substantial lives, by Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub.

But to survive in high society Disraeli walked a fine line between fact and fiction. Occasionally Jane Ridley confuses the two.Nevertheless this is a good book, authoritative, perspicacious and well- written. It is the first of two projected volumes, covering 42 years of Disraeli’s life Do we need another biography of Disraeli? Hardly. One of the attractions to the public of Dis-raeli’s works was that they drew so obviously on real people and events. “They are all written from my own feelings and experience.” This new biography uses Disraeli’s novels as source material, particularly the three early novels which he described as “the secret history of my feelings”.