“Read no history,” Benjamin Disraeli famously said, “nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” Fair enough. Yet except for the fact that it happens to be true, who would believe the story of this half-educated, circumcised and Anglicanised Italian Jew (whose family had made its money in straw hats), who became the Queen’s favourite?
28 July 2016, The Tablet
Dizzy heights
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