Many of us have a weakness for biographies of the more eccentric, fantastic or rackety Victorians. Trevor-Roper’s hilarious account of Sir Edmund Backhouse is a great favourite. Ian Anstruther’s biography of Oscar Browning, that naughty public-school master, is another, while his account of the Eglinton Tournament in the Knight and the Umbrella has become a cult book. Now he has produced a biography of the original of Disraeli’s Sir Vavasour Firebrace in Sybil: Sir Richard Broun, Victorian champion of the baronets against the plebeians. 

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