In 1873, Queen Victoria's private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, noted disapprovingly: “Disraeli really has an admiration for splendour, for Duchesses with ropes of pearls, for richness and gorgeousness” (305). So he did, and his intimate accounts of Victorian society still fascinate in the letters on which Hibbert's biography is largely based. They are, of course, only a part of Disraeli's complete correspondence, which is striking for its variety. He suited style and content to recipient, whether his sovereign or a civil service applicant. Yes, there was social gossip for family and friends (though usually accompanied by a political quip or two), but there were also terse practicalities for his legion of financial advisors, a comrade's sympathy for struggling writers, and solid political thinking for parliamentary colleagues and foreign diplomats. Anyone who reads, say, the impressive correspondence in the 1850s and 1860s with Lord Derby knows how much more there is to Disraeli than balls and assemblies.

“Social” in this biography means high life, not national welfare. Hibbert's subject is not Disraeli the reformer, maker of empire and sage of international politics, but Dizzy the star of aristocratic circles, flippant and witty, name dropping, flattering Queen Victoria, and happily appointing dukes and earls to his cabinet. (This last was regular nineteenth-century practice; Disraeli's own rise to the top of the greasy pole was a notable exception to the rule that title and power went together.) Wherever possible, Hibbert reproduces Disraeli's own voice in lengthy quotations from his letters, and he is adept at picking the most interesting—in 1868, for example, when Disraeli (prime minister at last) asked Lord Stanley for the Foreign Office reception rooms because Downing Street was so dingy that even his wife, the resourceful Mary Anne, could do nothing with it (274) or in the amusing glimpses of royal life at Balmoral, after he recovered from a train journey that took nearly two days (276–79).

The reader for pleasure will find a great deal here. Hibbert weaves the extracts into a whole that is fluid and entertaining. Scholars, however, will be disappointed. Little is new, and too much is familiar from Monypenny and Buckle's Life of Benjamin Disraeli (London: Murray, 1910–20). Citations from that and more recent biographies are sometimes inaccurate; a misreading of Jane Ridley's Young Disraeli (New York: Crown, 1995), for example, produces the surprising statement that Mary Anne's first husband, Wyndham Lewis, left his industrial interests to her scapegrace brother (126). Chronology is frequently unclear and references faulty: of eighteen citations for chapter 10, half are wrong. This will not matter to an uncritical reader, but it will to anyone interested in textual accuracy or the dates that “today” or “tomorrow” in the extracts refer to.

The transcriptions sometimes reproduce the Queen's University's Benjamin Disraeli Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982–present), sometimes Monypenny and Buckle, and, confusingly, sometimes elements of both. For the early years, this raises a particular problem since Monypenny used a corrupt text, Ralph Disraeli's Lord Beaconsfield's Correspondence with His Sister (London: Murray, 1886), which silently conflated extracts from as many as half a dozen letters into single “letters” under arbitrary dates. Hibbert thus perpetuates more of Ralph's textual sleight of hand than we expect from such a respected historian. Since he too conflates, the sequence of events is hard to follow; in chapter 15, eight different letters appear together, out of chronological order and given a reference for only one (136–37).

The content is not always up-to-date. The scandal over the “plagiarised” Wellington eulogy in 1852 was far more calculated and insidious than the bland account given here. With the courtship of Mary Anne, although her side of the correspondence is readily available (Letters, vol. 3), quotations here are from Mollie Hardwick's unreliable Mrs. Dizzy (London: Cassell, 1972), as is the confused chronology for the couple's serious quarrel in February 1839. When, in a famous letter, Disraeli threatened to end their relationship, Mary Anne did not delay in reconciling with him, nor did she subsequently ever express doubts; her letter doing so—here dated “next day” (132)—was from a spat the previous October. There is other evidence of uncharacteristic sloppiness. In one (misdated) letter, dropping quotation marks turns a hostess's disparagement of bluestockings into Disraeli's (72). The profusion of illustrious names is a minefield for identifications, with too many of them wrong—perhaps forgivable with generations of Rothschilds (114) but less so when Henry Hope, dedicatee of Coningsby, is confused with his father, Thomas (144), or George Wombwell, third Baronet, with the well-known menagerie proprietor (115).

Most worrying are the omissions. Disraeli certainly wrote that the 1856 Parliament was popularly seen as “an uneventful session” (228), but cutting the quotation short misleads since he went on to negate that idea, adding that the conservatives had laid “a broad & deep foundation for future action” (Letters, vol. 6, 2859). Disraeli labored hard—often at the expense of personal ambition—to make his party cohesive and efficient, but there are few traces of that groundwork here. Some of the speeches that marked his rise are not mentioned: where is the famous “apes and angels” speech of 1864? Hibbert simply lets Disraeli describe the speeches’ reception; there is scant attention to content. Disraeli's important 1872 speech at the Crystal Palace is only “another triumph” (283), when, by equating conservatism and empire, it gave his party a much-needed ideology. Discussion of the novels is limited almost entirely to identifying models for the characters, though we are told that in Coningsby, the novel that articulated Disraeli's view of moribund British politics, Sir Robert Peel is merely “in the background” (164), a dismissal of the polemic chapters attacking the Tory leadership. Absent from the sections on Tancred and Lothair are the topics of race and religion, central to any assessment of Disraeli.

Despite its readability, this is a biography with serious limitations. Even in the most brilliant gatherings, Disraeli seized opportunities for statesmanship. Politics, after all, were his passion, and they are the reason for his enduring importance.