——: Prisoner of Grace (1952). Chester Nimmo’s 30-year rise from lay preacher to cabinet minister through determination, astuteness, and a political sixth sense.
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo (1904). The rise and fall of Costaguanan governments with help from a British mine-owner who ends up owned by his mine.
——: The Secret Agent (1907). Informer Adolf Verloc schemes to blow up the Greenwich Observatory for a foreign power wanting to prod the British into repression.
——: Under Western Eyes (1910). A monarchist Russian is destroyed by chance involvement in revolutionary acts. The work of Red circles in and out of Russia.
Disraeli, Benjamin: Coningsby (1844). Enlightened nobleman at last becomes an M.P.
——: Sybil (1845). A less harried Young Englander does the same. Panorama of England c. 1837-1852 with great popular uprisings emphasizing national discontent.
——: Tancred (1847). The hero recoils from politics, finding spiritual and political insights amidst comic opera imbroglios in the deserts of the Holy Land.
Eliot, George: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). Provincial politics in the 1830s. Gallery of types from the extreme radical to granite conservative. Complicated plot.
Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India (1924). Personal tragedies emphasize national tragedy of divided and unhappy India governed by inflexible and unfeeling Britain.
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World (1932). A totalitarian world of the future in which stability has been achieved through destruction of freedom and the soul.