“There are certain chapters in the middle of Phineas Redux that are Trollope at the highest power.”

“At its core, Phineas Redux is more about friendship than romance, family life, or even politics…Alliances through friendship permeate political and romantic relationships alike and repeatedly entwine them together…Friendship is for Trollope one of the most stable of social bonds and yet also a transitory and transitional one, another in-between state, that is always in danger of becoming something less or more.”

“Later Palliser novels such as Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister ennoble—at times even heroize—exemplary characters. The thoroughgoing corruption these novels depict does not neutralize or even privatize human virtue so much as portray public life as a grueling duty (Palliser) or exacting challenge (Finn) to which ethical exemplars must submit.”

“There is a case for arguing that Phineas Redux, although perhaps less well-known and popular than Phineas Finn, is in some ways a greater achievement. In it Trollope displays, at times almost negligently, his two greatest strengths—his power of characterization and his capacity to dramatize the ordinary…In Phineas Redux, with its darker tone and more astringent style, it is recognizably a real world with which we are dealing and we pay it the ultimate tribute of feeling a genuine sense of loss when we leave it.”