Essays in Political & Literary History
Wilson · Gladstone · Disraeli
By Delmington Peregrine
Est. 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
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
Wilson · August 2025
No one has written almost anything about this short story by a future president. It reveals his southern heart and a little-discussed family tragedy.
August 12, 2025
Disraeli · July 2025
The delicious digressions of the young Disraeli’s narrator were axed in later editions. Best to read the excellent Routledge edition, which retains the original text even if it gets some of the author’s copious allusions wrong.
July 28, 2025
Gladstone · July 2025
Correcting a gap in our cinematic education.
July 23, 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.