The Grand Tour Journal of the14th Earl in 1820-1822

In December 1820, at twenty-one years old, Edward Geoffrey Stanley began an extensive tour of continental Europe with a focus on Italy. By the time of his return to England twenty months later he had visited many of Italy's most celebrated sites of art and culture, as well as exploring the Swiss Alps and parts of Austria and Germany. This precious collection of diaries, found only recently and published here for the first time, reveal Stanley to have been a young man of diligence, courage and decisiveness. It was these characteristics, seen in early development within these pages, that shaped the man and the extraordinary career to come. He was the first British statesman to become prime minister three times and remains the longest serving party leader in modern British politics. A complex, astute and influential figure, he dominated the political scene during the mid-nineteenth century.

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