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Superior Person

其他書名	A Portrait of Curzon and His Circle in Late Victorian England
出版	Weybright and Talley, 1969
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=wEAmAQAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"In 1898, before he was forty, George Nathaniel Curzon, first and last Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, was appointed Viceroy of India. It was a role for which he had consciously trained himself since his schooldays. Englishmen still believed robustly in the civilizing mission of the British Empire, and a small, self-sufficient ruling class of aristocratic and landowning families took their right to rule for granted. It was, to use Kenneth Rose's striking phrase, an age of gunroom diplomacy, in which the shared intimacies of Eton and Balliol, of country house and London club, dominated politics and influenced policy both at home and abroad. Curzon's character and creed crystallized early in life. Even as an Oxford undergraduate he earned the label of 'a most superior person.' Relentless ambition, commanding intellect, devouring industry, fervent imperialism and a spirit of adventure that led him to explore the most inaccessible parts of Persia and Central Asia were tempered by a zest for enjoyment and a genius for friendship. But the strain of high office and overwork undermined his health, allowed arrogance and impatience to corrode even his closest ambitions to dust. That is another absorbing theme of Kenneth Rose's masterly work. Above all, SUPERIOR PERSON is a superb evocation of the world ruling class in late Victorian England. Based on their voluminous and uninhibited correspondence, much of it published here for the first time, it embraces politics and patronage, recreation and romance, scandal and sentimentality. The book glows with anecdote and is alive with characters. The bast throng includes Gladstone and Salisbury, Balfour and Rosebery, both in the public eye and at home; inspiringly eccentric teachers such as Oscar Browning and Benjamin Jowett; amorous poets such as Oscar Wilde and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; irreverent journalists such as Henry Labouchere and Harry Cust; Margot Asquith and her no less delectable sisters. The story also includes Curzon's marriage to an American heiress—typical of the period of Jenny Jerome's marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill—and the birth of their daughter Cynthia, who eventually married Sir Oswald Mosley. The American personalities in the panorama of Curzon's life are many. One can see in this book the final glory of the nineteenth century British Empire—especially in India—when the United States was just on the eve of its growth and power."-Publisher.