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Disraeli and the Eastern Question, by Milos Kovic, trans. Milos Damnjanovic; pp. xx + 339. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, £66.00, $115.00.
Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative prime minister between 1874 and 1880, used epigrams to devastating effect in political debates in the House of Commons. Sometimes his witticisms were too sharp. In September 1876 his rival, W. E. Gladstone, erstwhile (and future) leader of the Liberal Party, published an account of atrocities perpetrated by Ottoman forces against civilians in Bulgaria. Entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, it was dismissed by Disraeli as "of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the worst" (qtd. in Kovic 148). Disraeli's reaction to the news of atrocities emerging from the Balkans revealed a very different sensibility from much of the British political nation. Why Disraeli reacted in this way and how he emerged triumphant on the Eastern Question at the 1878 Congress of Berlin is the subject of Milos Kovic's book.
Combining an analysis of Disraeli's literary oeuvre with an assessment of the finer details of high politics and diplomacy in the late 1870s, Kovic makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Eastern Question. Whereas Ann Pottinger Saab, in "Disraeli, Judaism, and the Eastern Question" (International History Review 10.4 [1988]), located Disraeli's reaction within the context of Anglo-Jewish identities and politics, Kovic argues that...