THE YOUNGER PITT: The Years of Acclaim.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original brown cloth with titles in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. Light blue top-stain. Illustrated with a colour frontispiece portrait and 21 black and white plates. A fine copy, the binding square and tight, the contents clean and crisp throughout and free from any previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the fine dustwrapper. Not price-clipped (75s net to the front flap). A superb copy.

The first volume of Ehrman's monumental biography of William Pitt the Younger. An ambitious and extensive piece of scholarship, the biography took Ehrman 40 years to complete, with a second and third volume following in 1983 and 1996 respectively. The present volume deals with Pitt's origins and meteoric rise, becoming Prime Minister at the age of 24. As Boyd Hilton asserts, "Pitt dominated the politics of his time and John Ehrman's three-volumes dominate the historiography" (A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783-1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p.705).