Benjamin Disraeli was a British statesman and novelist. He was Prime Minister in 1868 and 1874. He gave the Conservative Party a policy of Tory democracy and imperialism. His travels furnished him with material for the Oriental descriptions he used in later novels and influenced his attitude toward foreign relations with India, Egypt, and Turkey in the 1870s. Lothair was written in 1870. Lothair is a young man who is quite wealthy. When his parents died his guardians became Lord Culloden, a member of the Scottish Kirk, and the brilliant cleric Grandison, who adopts the Catholic faith and later becomes a Catholic Cardinal. Catholics and the Italian patriots struggle and maneuver for control of the wealthy and influential Lothair.