Kindle Notes & Highlights
The first aim of this book is to challenge this image of Castlereagh as the unthinking reactionary. Previous biographers of Castlereagh have done much to rescue his name from simplistic condescension but this book takes the argument one step further. By examining his intellectual formation, it makes the claim that he is best understood – indeed that he can only be understood – as an inheritor of and champion of what he, too, saw as ‘enlightened’ values.30 His range of reading and engagement with history, literature and culture was much broader than his contemporaries realised and shaped his
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