"Castlereagh. Enlightenment, War & Tyranny" by John Bew, published in 2011 in Great Britain in hardback with dustjacket by Quercus, 722pp, ISBN 9780857381866

Condition Notes: New

About this book:
No British statesman of the nineteenth century reached the same level of international fame as Lord Castlereagh, or won as much respect from the great powers of Europe or America. Yet no British statesman has been so maligned by his contemporaries or hated by the public. His career took him from the brutal suppression of a bloody rebellion in Ireland to the splendour of Vienna and Paris. He imprisoned his former friends, abolished the Irish parliament, created the biggest British army in history, and redrew the map of Europe. At a time when the West turns from idealism to realism in its foreign policy, Castlereagh's reputation is being revived. Yet neither his detractors nor his defenders have truly understood this shy, inarticulate but sometimes passionate man. 

In this book, John Bew tells the story of Castlereagh from the French Revolution through the Irish rebellion, the Napoleonic Wars, the diplomatic power struggles of 1814-5 and the mental breakdown that ended his life. John Bew paints a magisterial portrait not only of his subject but the tumultuous times in which he acted. Rather than the tyrant of legend, Castlereagh was a man whose mind captured the complexity of the European Enlightenment as much as any other. His mind was conservative and enlightened at the same time - and no less the one for being the other. 

About the author (2011):

John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department of King's College London and has been described as the "leading British historian of generation". Having begun his career in Cambridge University, John was awarded the 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize for International Studies and in 2013-4 became the youngest ever holder of the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. He is a contributing writer at the New Statesman and an experienced radio and television broadcaster. John is the author of five books including Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (Quercus, 2011), which was a book of the year in The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Total Politics, and BBC Parliament’s Booktalk. Other books include a co-written work, Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country (Columbia University Press, 2009), which was named in Foreign Policy magazine’s Global Thinkers Book Club, and the critically-acclaimed Realpolitik: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015). His most recent book is Citizen Clem: A Life of Clement Attlee (Riverrun, 2016). John was born in Belfast in 1980, educated at Cambridge, and lives in London.

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