Philip Ziegler
Rosemary Hill's God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, £30) is an informed and scholarly study of a great architect, a wide-ranging conspectus of the social and aesthetic movements of the age, and a brilliantly perceptive account of an extravagant, passionate and too often tormented soul. It is difficult to believe that this extraordinarily accomplished work is a first biography.
Robert Peel was neither extravagant, passionate nor tormented but he was one of the giants of 19th-century politics. Norman Gash in his great life of Peel left little room for even the most zealous researcher to find new material of significance. What Douglas Hurd provides in this biography (Robert Peel, Weidenfeld, £25) is the sympathetic insight of one who has done many of the same things and understands the pressures under which Peel was working. This is a thoughtful and thoughtprovoking book, beautifully written and admirably fair.
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