I’ve been reading four different nonfiction books all somewhat related in terms of time period at any rate. Three of them are Messner biographies:

• Disraeli by Manuel Komroff
• The Real Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle by Mary Hoehling
• Iron Chancellor: Otto van Bismarck by Alfred Apsler

The third book is one I’ve been reading off and on since January: Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. This last book is fascinating, but rather dense, almost 1000 pages long. This book moves past the lives of Disraeli and Bismarck all the way into the early twentieth century, but it spends a great deal of time on the events and characters of the late nineteenth century

I’ve learned a few things:

• Disraeli was an interesting man, a Jewish convert to Christianity. He faced a lot of anti-semitic prejudice, but managed to succeed in politics in spite of the bigotry. Queen Victoria loved him, and so did a lot of the British populace. The press called him “Dizzy.” He was a conservative reformer, which seems to be a contradiction in terms, but isn’t. He was a compassionate conservative before the term was invented.
• Bismarck, on the other hand, was a piece of work. He comes across both in the biography by Apsler and in Dreadnought as a power hungry genius who managed young William I, Emperor of Germany, with adroit flattery and finesse, until he didn’t. And William fired him, or removed him from office.
• William I, Queen Victoria’s grandson, was also a mess, as far as I can judge. He seems to have had a difficult childhood, partly due to his mother’s expectations and the burdens of being the crown prince, and he grew up up to be a proud, impulsive, self-centered, and sometimes irrational emperor with a lot of power. That’s a dangerous combination. I hate to say it, but William’s personality and his decisions and statements reminded me of a certain president whose name begins with T. William I considered himself to be a stable genius who knew all that was important to know about anything worth knowing.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle comes into the story of those times as a civilian, not a prince or a politician, but still a man who had political opinions and acted upon them. Doyle volunteered as a doctor during the Boer War and believed in the British cause during that war. As far as I could tell, the British were out of place, domineering, and downright cruel in that war and shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But Doyle couldn’t see that from his perspective, and he actually wrote a defense of the British actions in the Boer War that was published all over Europe and was quite influential in swinging public opinion to favor the British over their opponents, the Dutch-heritage Boers.

I learned a lot of other tidbits. Dizzy was a sharp and unconventional dresser. Doyle grew up poor and never managed to make a good living as a doctor. He made his fortune from his Sherlock Holmes stories. Bismarck (and his successors) stayed in power partly by threatening to resign and leave poor William with someone worse or less amenable. It seems a strange way to retain power, but because of the way the government was set up, it worked most of the time.

I recommend all four books, but Dreadnought is a slog. It’s worth it, if you’re interested in the history of Europe leading up to World War I. However, it takes some time and concentration to get through the book. Maybe check out one of the biographies first. Or try a biography of Queen Victoria or of other people from the time period.