A duke who never wanted office holds a coalition together and is destroyed by the small things: a borough, a discourtesy, a wife who cannot stop helping. Alongside it, a Portuguese adventurer marries into a family that despises him. Trollope thought Plantagenet Palliser and his wife his finest creation and wrote them across six novels; this is the one where politics is shown as a matter of manners, and manners as a lethal weapon.
