If the vigour of the debate generated by a historical subject is testimony to its ability to attract the creative talents of the leading historians of each generation, then the political careers of William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli stand out beyond all others of the nineteenth century. Among the most striking features to emerge from the above survey is that controversy regarding the doings and motivations of these two political personalities was present from the very beginning of their careers and shows no sign of abating. Accounts of historiographical debates often deploy the language of traditional and revisionist viewpoints, but in the case of Gladstone and Disraeli this will not do. While both politicians received ‘monumental’ biographies in the shape of John Morley's Life of William Ewart Gladstone (1903) and William Monypenny and George Buckle's Life of Benjamin Disraeli (1910–20), each of these books was no mere hagiography – both were sophisticated pieces of historical scholarship and set new standards in the writing of political biographies. Accordingly, both books contained complex assessments that did not fit into any simple heroic account of their subject matter. Morley, for example, showed just how slow and tentative was Gladstone's political journey into Lord Palmerston's Liberal cabinet, while Monypenny and Buckle highlighted Disraeli's reticence with regard to the question of parliamentary reform in 1866. Nevertheless, it is true to say that both large books cast a shadow over subsequent writing on Gladstone and Disraeli through into the post-1945 period. Most writers between the wars tended to take the essential outlines of the careers of Gladstone and Disraeli for granted – whether it was accepting that Disraeli took an active interest in social reform in the 1870s or that Gladstone's engagement with Ireland was motivated by a principled determination to alleviate the sufferings of its people. Even then there were occasional questioning voices – such as Carl Bodelsen's critical 1924 study of Disraeli's commitment to imperialism. But it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that something approaching a revolution in Gladstone and Disraeli scholarship occurred, as a series of books and articles appeared re-evaluating one after another of the assumptions hitherto made about their careers.