Written in that very British style of lots of commas, convoluted sentence structure and many very big words on those 850 pages of the main body that sent me scurrying to the Internet, it was very the less an extraordinarily good book. Very challenging even if you have a decent grounding in British governmental history of the 19th Century, but well worth the effort. ( )

At six years of age, Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, was sent to a brutal boarding school he likened to "an existence among devils." By 23, he was a member of the British Parliament. And before his death at age 73 in 1903, he would spend nearly two decades as Britain's Prime Minister, single-mindedly driving the British Empire to extend its iron grip to five continents. This multiple award-winning biography sheds uncompromising light on Lord Salisbury's troubled family life, his transformational experiences in Australia, India, and Africa, and his dogged pursuit of political power in the court of Queen Victoria.