Essays in Political & Literary History
Wilson · Gladstone · Disraeli
By Delmington Peregrine
Est. 2025
Wilson · January 2026
Woodrow Wilson worried genius marries badly, because of Shelley’s example. He was thinking of himself. His wife replied sarcastically: “the poor helpless men of genius are not utterly unprotected.”
January 31, 2026
Disraeli · January 2026
Disraeli wrote a novel about the long lost love of his hero Lord Byron. In doing so he positioned himself for a new role as a conservative, simultaneously rehabilitating and distancing himself from the poet. So why do so few critics mention Byron’s childhood sweetheart?
January 27, 2026
Disraeli · December 2025
A dandy politician-novelist in deep debt choosing an older married woman in 1837? Fascinating. Too bad that’s not the story Disraeli’s love novel tells.
December 21, 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
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.