Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Antonia Fraser is the author of many widely acclaimed historical works which have been international bestsellers. She was awarded the Norton Medicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2000 and was made DBE in 2011 for her services to literature.

www.antoniafraser.com/

De la contraportada

Critical acclaim for Antonia Fraser

Praise for Love and Louis XIV

'Fraser brings to life the female stars circling the Sun King in an account that successfully combines erudition with gossipy stories of the kind the Versailles courtiers loved so much.' The Sunday Times
'Fraser brilliantly dissects the intense rivalry of the ladies who indulged in 'commerce' with the king.' Ian Pindar, The Observer

Praise for Marie Antoinette: The Journey

'A brilliant pictoure not only of politics and revolution, but also of the cruelty of man to man - and a woman more sinned against than sinning' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mail on Sunday

'Drama, betrayal, religion and sex, it's all here, adorned by often fascinating, at times esoteric detail' Hazel Mills, Guardian

De la solapa interior

Internationally bestselling historian Antonia Fraser's new book brilliantly evokes an episode of pre-Victorian political and social history - the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. These events led to a total change in the way Britain was governed, a two-year revolution that she brings to vivid dramatic life.

Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 is full of extraordinary characters. On the one hand, the reforming heroes are the Whig aristocrats Lord Grey, Lord Althorp and Lord John Russell. They included members of the richest most landed cabinet in history, yet they were determined to bring liberty, which in theory whittled their own power in the country. They acted in alliance with the other working and middle class heroes, reformers and so-called 'revolutionaries' such as Francis Place the Radical Tailor, and the brilliant charismatic banker Thomas Attwood of Birmingham. The all-too conservative Tory opposition comprised the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and the courtiers of William IV, headed by his German consort Queen Adelaide, much attacked by the satirists.

This is a book that features two eventful years, much of them violent. This was a time when our great manufacturing cities such as Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham were without representation in Parliament. There were riots in Bristol, Manchester, Nottingham and countrywide, beginning with the agricultural disturbances of Captain Swing. The time span of the book is from the accession of William IV, following the death of his brother George IV, and the second French Revolution of July 1830; the ball is set rolling by Prime Minister Wellington's declaration of November 1830 that 'the beginning of reform is the beginning of revolution' and the fall of the Tory government. It ends with William IV's reluctant assent to the Great Reform Bill in June 1832 because he faces a double threat: he must either swamp the rebellious House of Lords with newly created peers, or combat revolution in the country. Perilous Question is an exceptional work of narrative history, one that truly casts a distant mirror on events today.