EBOOK Prime Minister

'though a great many men and not a few women knew Ferdinand Lopez very well, none        of them knew whence he had come'Despite his mysterious antecedents, Ferdinand Lopez        aspires to join the ranks of British society. An unscrupulous financial speculator,        he determines to marry into respectability and wealth, much against the wishes of        his prospective father-in-law. One of the nineteenth century's most memorable        outsiders, Lopez's story is set against that of the ultimate insider, Plantagenet        Palliser, Duke of Omnium. Omnium reluctantly accepts the highest office of state;        now, at last, he is 'the greatestman in the greatest country in the world'. But his        government is a fragile coalition and his wife's enthusiastic assumption of the role        of political hostess becomes a source of embarrassment. Their troubled relationship        and that of Lopez and Emily Wharton is a conjunction that generates one ofTrollope's        most complex and substantial novels.Part of the Palliser series, The Prime Minister        's tale of personal and political life in the 1870s has acquired a new topicality in        the early twenty-first century.