Prime Minister William Gladstone is said to have taken opium in tea or coffee before making important speeches.

BBC: 100 years of the war on drugs

His polemical style helped topple the government and return Liberal opposition leader William Gladstone to power in 1880.

WSJ: Bookshelf: The Father of Tabloid Journalism

The collection includes letters from David Lloyd George, William Gladstone, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle.

BBC: Alfred Russel Wallace's 19th Century letters go online

David Lloyd George, William Gladstone, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle and Darwin himself are on the list.

BBC: Search for Alfred Russel Wallace's 19th Century letters

In 1809, William Gladstone, four times British prime minister, was born.

CNN: Monday,

The prime minister who led the UK through most of World War II was, like Wellington, Lord Palmerston and William Gladstone, accorded a full state funeral.

BBC: Prime ministers' funerals from Pitt to Heath

Slavers could count on the Archbishop of Canterbury to defend them before God, and on politicians, like the young William Gladstone, himself the son of a plantation-owner, to plead their case in Parliament.

ECONOMIST: Slavery

Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, explains how William Gladstone in the U.K. and Warren Harding in the U.S. got it done: by keeping the functions of the state to a minimum.

FORBES: Two Of The All-Time Greatest Successes In Cutting Taxes And Spending

He paints a novel picture of a British prime minister, William Gladstone, acting like a New-Age healer and helping to relieve his wife's aching breasts, strained after years of child rearing, by gently stroking them.

ECONOMIST: Victorian values revisited

He emerges from these pages as Germany's equivalent of America's Thomas Jefferson or Britain's William Ewart Gladstone: a polymath of prodigious energy and formidable intellectual power.

ECONOMIST: Historical biography