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) tea tax, and Emperor Muzong, despite opposition from Li Jue, accepted Wang's proposal. Later in the year, Wang was made "Zhongshu Shilang" (中書侍郎), the deputy head of the legislative bureau of government (中書省), and chancellor "de facto" with the title "Tong Zhongshu Menxia Pingzhangshi" (同中書門下平章事); he also remained as the director of salt and iron monopolies. It was said that while serving as chancellor, Wang was only interested in flattering the emperor and did not speak of important matters of state. In 822, however, when there was a crisis over how Liu Wu the military governor of Zhaoyi Circuit (昭義,