Bücher von Michael Bentley

This study is an exercise in the history of political perception and opinion.

Once recalled only for The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and Christianity and History (1949), Sir Herbert Butterfield's contribution to western culture has undergone an astonishing revaluation over the past twenty years. What has been left out of this reappraisal is the man himself. Yet the force of Butterfield's writings is weakened without some knowledge of the man behind them: his temperament, contexts and personal torments. Previous authors have been unable to supply a rounded portrait for lack of available material, particularly a dearth of sources for the crucial period before the outbreak of war in 1939. Michael Bentley's original, startling 2011 biography draws on sources never seen before. They enable him to present a new Butterfield, one deeply troubled by self-doubt, driven by an urgent sexuality and plagued by an unending tension between history, science and God in a mind as hard and cynical as it was loving and charitable.

Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) is now a subject of intense historical attention. This important study moves away from conventional biography and presents an original portrait of the mental world inhabited by late Victorian Conservatives at the time when their world-view was coming under severe strain. At the centre of the picture is the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, but Lord Salisbury's World does not simply tell the story of his life and politics. Instead, it asks sensitive questions about how the political, intellectual and religious environments of the late Victorian period seemed to one of its sharpest intellects, and it situates Salisbury and his immediate entourage in a wide landscape of relationships, perceptions and problems. Professor Bentley takes the reader into Conservative assumptions about time and space, property and society, religion and the state, and the past and the future - the very language in which they expressed themselves.

This volume brings together a group of pupils, admirers and critics who have contributed essays dealing with facets of what Maurice Cowling calls 'public doctrine' in modern British history, together with critical assessments of his writing. The book aims to be as unsycophantic, rebarbative and diverting as its dedicatee.