Hurd and Young are masterful in delineating the limited scale of Disraeli's actual achievements — they do so with dry wit, an ear and eye for telling detail and an elegant, economical, prose style. Yet they are even better when it comes to explaining Disraeli's one great real — and lasting — triumph, the second life of the subtitle.

Disraeli succeeded — and succeeds still — in his construction of a mythic life-for himself, his party and his nation. His gifts as a novelist were of invention and romance rather than plot or prose style. And his greatest romantic invention was himself — a British Moses found among the parliamentary bulrushes, his Jewishness a precious gift, his leadership a great adventure, his story to be remembered for all time.

Disraeli had a talent — more properly, a genius — for enchantment. He invested a Tory party of dullard squires and rural reactionaries with the magic of a great chivalric crusade for a gentler, nobler, more unified kingdom. He refashioned Britain's Empire in such a way that a series of acts of commercial positioning became a civilising mission to rank with the greatest achievements of Greece and Rome. He cast a spell — or curse — on his opponents, so that in the eyes of the public the genuinely noble, idealistic and conscientious Gladstone became a stiff and sanctimonious prig.

While enchantments fade — and Disraeli's constructs, like Klingsor's castle, disappeared when the wizard no longer wove his magic — the memory of what Disraeli conjured up still captivates. He gave all who study and practise politics a vivid lesson in how to move men's and women's hearts, through dash, romance and — above all — courage. 

He does not leave behind anything as prosaic as a coherent ideology. As Hurd and Young write, beautifully, of his ideas: "They were like a collection of silver, proudly displayed, constantly polished, often added to, but only occasionally used in the course of daily life." But what he does bequeath to us all is a vision of politics as something nobler than the manufacture of manifesto pledges, reasoned amendments and dull compromises. It can be a crusade — with men and women of all kinds and classes putting aside narrow calculations of advantage in the interests of committing themselves to a struggle that history will remember as a fight for grace, nobility and virtue.