Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman one of the few I should like to recall from the dead. It is a very good exercise for an historian to stray into biography - a field seemingly so similar and yet fundamentally different. Perhaps no historian can really handle individual psychology or make an individual the centre of his book. All the same I think my "Bismarck" is the best on him ever written". Taylor's Bismarck is not the Junker and iron Chancellor but a complicated, urban intellectual, "the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthen father". Instead of
Wang Bo (chancellor) in 821. Another chancellor, Xiao Mian, objected vehemently, calling Wang "delicate and wicked" and arguing that the popular sentiment was against Wang's being made chancellor. When Emperor Muzong refused to listen, Xiao resigned his chancellorship. Emperor Muzong subsequently ordered Wang to return to Xichuan, but after Wang pleaded to remain, as Duan was also offering to resign, Duan was made the military governor of Xichuan. Wang, while not made chancellor, was kept at Chang'an to serve as the minister of justice (刑部尚書) and again as the director of the salt and iron monopolies. Wang subsequently proposed an increase in the