With their fundamental distrust of change, how is it that the Conservatives have managed to cope with change relatively successfully? John Charmley has written an entertaining but fair account of one of the principal forces in modern British political history, illuminated throughout by a concentration upon the men, and the woman, who charted the party through a century of warfare and welfare. The second edition of this successful text is thoroughly updated to take into account the latest scholarship, and now has an earlier starting date to make sense of the importance of the Home Rule issue in defining late nineteenth-century Toryism. Charmley takes the story through the recent "wilderness years" following the 1997 election fiasco.

JOHN CHARMLEY is Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia. His other publications include Churchill: The End to Glory and Churchill's Grand Alliance.