Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers: Her Life, the Imperial Ideal, and the Politics and Turmoil That Shaped Her Extraordinary Reign

Queen Victoria was a formidable personality. Passionately opinionated, with an idiosyncratic way of expressing herself, she was a woman who was born to rule with no room for doubt about her historic destiny or the might of the empire that was built in her name. She wrote in 1899, "We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist."

She was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland and of the British Empire She ascended to the throne in 1837 at the age of 18 and became a revered global presence. And she died in 1901 at 81, a grandmotherly figure to her millions of subjects.

Anne Somerset writes of this epoch reign and about the incessant politics that Victoria cared about so passionately, revealed in the emotional and strategic relationships she forged with the ten Prime Ministers who headed her government.

Somerset writes of Victoria's girlish adoration of her first prime minister, the worldly-wise Lord Melbourne, as they together modernized and stabilized the country in the midst of great upheaval; of Benjamin Disraeli (she called him "Dizzy") . . . And Disraeili's great rival, William Gladstone, (Victoria referred to him as, "that dreadful old man"), who, when he became prime minister for the fourth time at the age of eighty-two, Victoria declared it "a bad joke" that this "dangerous old fanatic" should be "thrust down her throat."

Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers is a portrait of an age of massive global and domestic change and of the beloved monarch at the center who made Great Britain into the world's most powerful nation.