Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain

"Bentley's study is an extremely successful attempt to analyze what he calls the `Conservative Environments' around and about the Marquis.... Bentley quite rightly remarks that Lord Salisbury was `bitingly intelligent, focused and funny' (p. 6). So is Michael Bentley, who writes in a tellingly ironic yet often elegiac style which reflects an historian completely at home in his period, more than aware of its nuances, and quite prepared to indulge in unwhiggish and trenchant criticism of modernity." Journal of Church and State

"It is shapes in the mind, not in society that concern Bentley, and the result is a somewhat unconventional, sometimes amorphous, but invariably stimulating analysis of the party's most penetrating intellect.... Bentley's book is an important contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of the history of a party formerly derided as stupid, unimaginative, or nonideological.... Specialists will savor it." Choice

"This is a book to savor as a true Tory author revels in the company of the great exemplar of Toryism...Bentley succeeds better than any previous historian in bringing out the calm rationality of Salisbury's response to some of the new movements, such as socialism, from which he recoiled...fascinating..." Albion