Endymion

A politician's son, ruined by his father's failure, rises from a clerkship to the cabinet with the help of three women who between them run more of England than the ministers do. Disraeli wrote his last novel after leaving office for the final time, and put half the public men of his lifetime into it under other names. It was the largest sum ever paid for a novel at the time, and it reads like a man settling accounts pleasantly. Fifty-five plates by painters including Ingres and Tissot trace the political and social world of the novel, from classical readings before emperors to Victorian letters and the Thames.