Reviewed by George Rosie

If ever a book deserved its subtitle. "The Last Grandee" is how the American academic RJQ Adams describes his subject, Arthur James Balfour, politician, philosopher and one-time British prime minister. His account of the life and times of this strange, handsome, intellectually wayward Scottish aristocrat makes fascinating reading.

Born in 1848, and heir to 180,000 acres of land in East Lothian and Easter Ross, Balfour's education took a common route for young aristos: private tutoring, prep school followed by Eton, then King's College, Cambridge. But for all his fine-boned looks and languid ways, Balfour was no high-born dreamer. He may have written on the subjects of philosophy and theology, but he was endlessly fascinated by new technologies - he had one of the first motor cars in Scotland and liked to drive around his estate at Whittinghame on a motorcycle. He was also an avid golfer, a decent tennis player, loved his gramophone and soaked up cheap thrillers and westerns.

And, of course, he was an ambitious politician. By 1874 he was he was a Conservative MP; by 1886 he was Scottish Secretary coping with unrest among the crofters of the West Highlands. A year later he became Irish Secretary (the 10th in a decade) tasked with keeping the Union intact against the rising power of the Irish nationalists who assumed that the languid Scot would prove easy meat. They couldn't have been more wrong.

Balfour had a two-pronged policy which he pursued with vigour and which earned him the epithet "Bloody Balfour". He harried every act of protest he saw as criminal and backed the Royal Irish Constabulary to the hilt, even when they became trigger-happy. But he also squeezed Ireland's grasping landlords until their pips squeaked.

I'm not sure that Balfour's tenure of 10 Downing Street between July 1902 and December 1905 can be counted as a huge success. On the liberal side he reorganised local education, tried to sort out Ireland's rural problems by encouraging the sale of land to tenant farmers, and, via the new Committee of Imperial Defence, recast Britain's worldwide strategy.

On the other hand, he fell foul of liberal opinion and organised labour by importing thousands of indentured Chinese labourers into South Africa to work in the country's gold mines. He resigned as prime minister at the end of 1905 after the Tory government split down the middle over the hot topic of free trade.

But his resignation as PM was not the end of his high-flying political career. Balfour continued as leader of the Tory party and during the first world war he became First Lord of the Admiralty and then Foreign Secretary. After the war he did two stints as Lord President of the Council - which involved rethinking Britain's relations with the "dominions" of the British Empire. He was made an earl in 1922 by his good friend, King George V. Balfour remained a bachelor all his life, although he seems to have swum into the marital sights of some very interesting women.

But if there's one thing for which Arthur Balfour is remembered it's the words he penned in November 1917 at his mansion in Whittinghame. Known as The Balfour Declaration, the paper is cherished by Jews and hated by Arabs; declaring the British government's support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people " Many an Arab orator has ascribed all the woes of the Middle East to those 12 words. But they always omit Balfour's proviso that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

The fact that modern Israel accepts one part of the declaration's most crucial sentence and rejects the other is hardly the fault of Arthur Balfour, who died in 1930, almost 20 years before the state of Israel came into being. But if Balfour meant what he wrote he must be turning in his East Lothian grave at the current sorry plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. (Two years later the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote to Balfour asking his permission to call a Jewish settlement Balfouria.) Balfour may not have been one of the most significant prime ministers of the 20th century, but he's certainly one of the most interesting. It's hard to think of another one who could have penned books such as In Defence Of Philosophical Doubt or Foundations Of Belief, or who would have gone back into the Cabinet after having run the show as prime minister. In this long, detailed and meticulously researched biography Professor Adams does a grand job of bringing to life the man he calls "the last grandee", one of the more original Scots who've made Number 10 Downing Street their temporary digs.