Essays in Political & Literary History
Wilson · Gladstone · Disraeli
By Delmington Peregrine
Est. 2025
Disraeli · November 2025
Disraeli wrote a novel with his sister in 1834 and it wasn’t discovered until 1979. It tells us more about his switch from Radical to Tory than much of his other work.
November 8, 2025
Gladstone · October 2025
Disraeli dreamed in 1833 of reviving Israel, before “Zionism” was a word: “A single day, a single man, and we might be a nation.” Did he hope to be that single man?
October 16, 2025
Wilson · October 2025
“I feel inclined after this dose of Balzac to equal or exceed you in your contempt for the French,” Ellen Wilson wrote her husband in 1889. Later that contempt would have foreign policy implications.
October 13, 2025
Disraeli · September 2025
Disraeli got the credit for inventing the parliamentary novel, but Balzac started one first. It’s too bad he died before he could finish it — what remains shows Balzac longed for a French politics not unlike Disraeli’s.
September 25, 2025
Wilson · September 2025
Wilson, far from home with no reason to expect his girlfriend would be in the same town, recognized the silhouette of her hairstyle in a hotel window. It led to their engagement and perhaps the lifelong belief in Providence for which the statesman became both beloved and reviled.
September 9, 2025
Disraeli · August 2025
Disraeli’s semi-autobiographical novel shows the conflict between the poet and the politician—and between the Byron and the Voltaire in him.
August 26, 2025
About
Delmington Peregrine is a journalist, writer, and arts critic. These essays trace the intersection of political history and literary criticism, with Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli, and William Ewart Gladstone as sustained focal figures.