Mere Party

• Pillars of Government, and Other Essays on State and Society c.1770-c.1880 by Norman Gash
  Arnold, 202 pp, £25.00, June 1986, ISBN 0 7131 6463 8
• Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 by Norman Gash
  Longman, 745 pp, £12.50, July 1986, ISBN 0 582 49722 1

A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and constitutional history.