The cult of political biography is gently withering with the decline in the number of its adherents. How pleasing and unexpected, then, to read about Lord Dufferin, in a scholarly, well-researched volume, elegantly written and published by John Murray, which in its ancient regime heyday issued many such tomes. Andrew Gailey is a fine historian David Gilmour, Literary Review A scholarly book that will leave readers wiser about Victorian England as well as one of its most distinguished characters Country Life A story with a terrific denouement and unexpected psychological twists, skilfully unravelled by Gailey, whose research has been prodigious -- Piers Brendon Independent Well equipped to convey Dufferin's importance as an Ulster icon in the imperial age, [Andrew Gailey] also handles the haut ton of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain with aplomb. He writes engagingly, a graceful turn of phrase leavened by the odd stiletto thrust, and he is an acute psychologist Roy Foster, Carroll professor of Irish history at Hertford College, Oxford Brilliantly places the glamorous but forgotten Irish proconsul Lord Dufferin in a world of contemporary myth-making and celebrity politics Irish Times

Andrew Gailey has taught history at Eton College since 1981 and was a housemaster from 1993 to 2006. Since then he has been elected Vice-Provost and a Fellow of the College. A graduate of St Andrews and the University of Cambridge, he is the author of numerous studies of Anglo-Irish relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has a particular research interest in constructive unionism.