a number of biographies, principally of W E Forster (a personal friend), and of Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but also including one of Charlotte Brontë. He also wrote a book on Tunisia, "Land of the Bey", and a number of popular novels, including "Gladys Fane". On his death the Yorkshire Post, the Leeds-based rival of the Mercury described him as an inveterate political wire-puller who had known more about the formation of William Ewart Gladstone's administration in 1892 that anybody else outside the official circles. He was knighted in 1894. Reid died in 1905 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London. A former subordinate offered the following pen-portrait: His style, if direct and clever, was common place, and his manner of speech retained more than a suggestion of Northern provincialism. But at every point and in every situation he had a personality that impressed. He was self-willed, self-assured, and if provoked eminently combative. It was not by suavity alone that he made his way. He could fight, and I know that in politics at any rate he was a tolerably good hater. He was afraid of nobody. Rather below the medium height, without any particular graces of person or of address, he could hold his own anywhere. He talked well and unaffectedly, and in his eyes, which had a curious scintillating brightness, there ever seemed to lurk a shrewd and humorous patronage of all men and things. Writings Among his more permanent writings are: volume I, volume II - a compendium of short biographical character sketches of leading statesman and foreign premiers. The Land of the Bey (1882), Gladys Fane (1883), and Lives of William Edward Forster (1888), and Lords Houghton (1891), and Playfair (1899), and William Black, Novelist (1902). He pronounced Heathcliff, from Wuthering Heights, "the greatest villain of literature." (From "A character study from "Wuthering Heights," The Nassau Literary Magazine (1848–1908); Apr 1879; 34, 9; American Periodicals Series Online). References Sources Author and Bookinfo.com External links Life of William Edward Forster by Thomas Wemyss Reid, Chapman and Hall, 1888 1842 births 1905 deaths Burials at Brompton Cemetery Knights Bachelor Writers from Newcastle upon Tyne English newspaper editors English male journalists English biographers English male novelists 19th-century English novelists 19th-century English male writers Male biographers