Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was prime minister for almost fifteen years, during which Britain won the Napoleonic Wars and endured the most dynamic and difficult phase of the Industrial Revolution. Yet he has enjoyed only four significant biographies in 190 years, a tribute to the strength of his political opponents in the historical profession. Now William Anthony Hay has produced a fifth, and for the first time the character of this extraordinary man is revealed to modern eyes. Hay begins by examining in detail the career of Liverpool’s father Charles Jenkinson (Lord Hawkesbury from 1786, 1st Earl…