This set of four volumes is the first in an ambitious new series. When deciding whether to allow the high price to deter them potential readers will need to consider the claims made for the series, and the underlying principles on which the contents have been selected. The chosen extracts, reproduced in facsimile, represent printed material (from books, pamphlets and periodical articles) published at the time of the events concerned or soon afterwards. The declared aim is to avoid ‘all of the pitfalls associated with hindsight’, and to rescue from oblivion contemporary sources which ‘might have been passed over by later biographers’. However certain important categories of primary material are not included. There are no manuscript sources, in the shape of letters, diaries and memoirs, unless these were published at the time; no speeches, except those reproduced in pamphlet form; and no writings by any of the three statesmen themselves. The four volumes provide a conveniently accessible anthology of more or less contemporary printed documents that many students of the period will welcome. Nevertheless the selection (only 27 extracts relating to Gladstone’s long career, for instance) is necessarily arbitrary, with some important periods inadequately covered; and the documents chosen vary considerably in weight and significance. These considerations seriously qualify any suggestion that the chosen extracts provide an authoritative contemporary picture, and one must be wary of allowing them to weigh too heavily in the balance against the considered assessment of all the available source material contained in modern biographies. For each of the three statesmen an introduction is provided in which recent scholarly work is summarized, and each of the chosen extracts is given a concise introduction describing the author, where known, and the context. There are also end notes, although these are not easy to use in the absence of reference numbers in the facsimile text, and sometimes the notes fail to draw attention to elementary factual errors in the documents (e.g., the misstatements that Disraeli was ‘somewhat younger than Gladstone’, and that Gladstone was three times prime minister).