Letters to Helen d'Arcy Stewart (Mrs. Dugald Stewart) from J.W. Ward, Earl of Dudley.

The story of the world's first fashion-obsessed society in 18th-century London Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London's fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society--the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and countryseats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan 'fashion'. Conspicuous consumption and display were crucial; the right address, the right dinner guests, the right possessions, the right jewels, the right seat at the opera. The Beau Monde leads us on a tour of this exciting new world, from court and parliament to London's parks, pleasure grounds, and private homes. From brash displays of diamond jewellery to the subtle complexities of political intrigue, we see how membership of the new elite was won, maintained--and sometimes lost. On the way, we meet a rich and colourful cast of characters, from the newly ennobled peer learning the ropes and the imposter trying to gain entry by means of clever fakery, to the exile banned for sexual indiscretion. Above all, as the story unfolds, we learn that being a Fashionable was about far more than simply being 'modish'. By the end of the century, it had become nothing less than the key to power and exclusivity in a changed world.

William Pitt the Younger is an illuminating biography of one of the great iconic figures in British history: the man who in 1784 at the age of twenty-four became (and so remains) the youngest Prime Minister in the history of England. In this lively and authoritative study, William Hague–himself the youngest political party leader in recent history–explains the dramatic events and exceptional abilities that allowed extreme youth to be combined with great power. The brilliant son of a father who was also Prime Minister, Pitt was derided as a “schoolboy” when he took office. Yet within months he had outwitted his opponents, and he went on to dominate the political scene for twenty-two years (nineteen of them as Prime Minister). No British politician since has exercised such supremacy for so long. Pitt’s personality has always been hard to unravel. Though he was generally thought to be cold and aloof, his friends described him as the wittiest man they ever knew. By seeing him through the eyes of a politician, William Hague–a prominent member of Britain’s Conservative Party–succeeds in explaining Pitt’s actions and motives through a series of great national crises, including the madness of King George III, the impact of the French Revolution, and the trauma of the Napoleonic wars. He describes how a man dedicated to peace became Britain’s longest-serving war leader, how Pitt the liberal reformer became Pitt the author of repression, and how–though undisputed master of the nation’s finances–he died with vast personal debts. With its rich cast of characters, including Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and George III himself, and set against a backdrop of industrial revolution and global conflict, this is a richly detailed and rounded portrait of an extraordinary political life.

Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind recasts the cultivation of a democratic intellect in the late Scottish Enlightenment. It comprises an intellectual history of what was at stake in moral education during a transitional period of revolutionary change between 1772 and 1828. Stewart was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, who inherited the Scottish philosophical tradition of teaching metaphysics as moral philosophy from the tuition of Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid. But the Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture of his youth changed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Stewart sustained the Scottish school of philosophy by transforming how it was taught as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His elementary system of moral education fostered an empire of the mind in the universal pursuit of happiness. The democratization of Stewart's didactic Enlightenment—the instruction of moral improvement—in a globalizing, interconnected nineteenth-century knowledge economy is examined in this book.

Published in 1965: This book is about the Period in which the Whig Party was in power between 1807 - 1812. It talks about Economics, Parliamentary reforms and wars.

Between 1808 and 1830, the Whigs made a remarkable transition from opposition to office that highlights important trends in early Nineteenth-Century Britain. The Whig Revival examines how a coalition between provincial interest groups and the parliamentary party established them as a viable governing party by 1830. Where earlier studies have focused on the Whigs experience in government or liberal reform movements, this work examines their years in opposition and how the struggle for power broadened the political nation beyond metropolitan elites.