Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Thomas Gainsborough, Peter Monamy and William Powell Frith. 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. Fifty-eight plates after Frith and Tissot, from drawing-room balls to a shipboard dance, catch the same social theatre in which Trollope's coalition lives and dies.
