With his unparalleled genius for self-promotion, Benjamin Disraeli advised us to ‘read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory’. Historians of the British Conservative party have followed his instructions faithfully, long seduced by the charms of the political biography. In recent years alone the world has seen the publication of two scholarly and highly flattering biographies of the third marquess of Salisbury, by Andrew Roberts and David Steele, alongside a reconstruction of the distinctive Salisburian philosophical world by Michael Bentley, and a long overdue biography of Bonar Law by R. J. Q. Adams. Of the newer vintage, we now have Anthony Seldon's biography of John Major and the first instalment of John Campbell's deconstruction of Margaret Thatcher. One can only shudder with trepidation at the unedifying prospect of the weighty and earnest tomes devoted to William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith awaiting tomorrow's historians. The fates and fortunes of the party continue to be intertwined unproblematically with the qualities of its successive leaders. On one level this is inevitable, befitting the self-image of a party which has always valued leadership and hierarchy. But on another level the predilection for biography has encouraged Conservative studies to remain stubbornly immured within a set of sterile and untheoretical paradigms. The tendency is for narration rather than explanation, for ‘party’ to be defined institutionally rather than organically, and for the world of politics to be reduced to conversations held within the hermetic corridors of Westminster. The more imaginative and innovative work on Victorian and Edwardian politics to have appeared in recent years has been carried out by historians of the Liberal and Labour parties.