There have only been two previous biographies of Lord Liverpool, despite him being the longest serving and one of the most important British Prime Ministers of the nineteenth century. Yonge's three volume Victorian biography is pretty dire, even as such works go - a quarry not a read - while Norman Gash's excellent biography of 1984 does not pretend to be anything more than a sketch or overview. Hay's biography is therefore particularly welcome. Liverpool is quite a complicated figure, with plenty of contradictions, and his character and conduct as PM can be interpreted in many different ways - he is a more opaque figure, for example, than Wellington, but he was the essential ingredient in the long survival of his government.