She had ‘strongly’ advised him to keep his nerve on the Eastern Question and to ‘bring things to an issue’. Only the previous week, the town of Plevna in Bulgaria had fallen to the Russians, a decisive moment in their war against Turkey. A Russian advance on Constantinople now seemed inevitable. Disraeli’s ominous warnings of the previous year about the threat Russia posed to British interests in Egypt and India now more than ever seemed incredibly astute. He needed no prompting by the Queen. ‘The country is asleep and I want to wake it,’ he told her. In fact, the fall of Plevna did the job
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