Victor Stater aptly chooses the infamous duel between Charles Mohun, fourth Baron Mohun, and James Douglas Hamilton, fourth Duke of Hamilton, to illustrate the pressures and social climate of a time when the aristocracy was regaining its lost prestige, just as the conditions which justified its elevated position in society were beginning to change forever.

The nobility had borne most of the costs of the English civil war between Charles I and parliament, both financially and in terms of their loss of status and security. In the decades that followed, especially after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, the battle to regain money and status became the focus of an aristocrat's daily grind.

Ironically, the 'aristocratic century' was a time when new fortunes were being made among the merchant classes. In competition with the so-called 'moneyed interest', a nobleman's status could only be maintained by ever more ostentatious spending.

For the lucky few, the money to finance a peer's lifestyle could be gained from rents and profits from land or the sale of military commissions. But mostly, a peer lived off credit secured against his estate or against the land he would be able to mortgage once he came into his inheritance.

For the most powerful men in the country, lack of sufficient estates could mean ruin and penury. And while they waited for a stubborn parent to die, the debts mounted unrelentingly.

Although the Scottish Tory Hamilton and the fanatical Whig Mohun had plenty of political reason to hate each other, their duel centred on the disputed estate of Gawsworth in Cheshire.

After years of battles in the courts, attempts at mutual eviction and a vicious political vendetta which had drawn in a string of unpleasant grasping relatives on both sides, both men were acting out of a desperate need to pull themselves out of a mire of debt.

Each had successful political careers and might have had glittering diplomatic achievements ahead of them. In fact, Hamilton was due to leave for Paris to be Ambassador to France, although he would have been hard-pressed to finance the venture out of his own pocket as would have been expected.

Instead, they killed each other, snuffing out their only chance of a prosperous future, in what Stater calls 'the most sensational duel to have taken place in Britain in decades'.

The pointlessness of the duel as a solution to a property dispute or as a means of maintaining honour could hardly have been better illustrated. No one benefited in any way by the slaughter.

Only the Tory party was able to make scurrilous anti-Whig propaganda out of an apparently trumped-up charge against Lord Mohun's assistant, accusing him of running Hamilton through with his sword.

Stater originally set out to research the union of England and Scotland in 1707.

Hamilton played a key role in Scotland's accession - to the disgust of many Scots who had hailed him as the champion of Scottish independence - and his long vacillation between service to Queen Anne and Jacobite loyalty to the exiled James II makes him a fascinating political subject.

However, once on the job, Stater clearly had an eye for the more tabloid story. Although what he has produced is history, meticulously researched and accompanied by the requisite academic annotations and bibliography, the story of the duel and the quarrel which led to it is almost as gripping as a novel.

This book is entertaining, informative and somehow reassuring about our own era as well. Corruption and personal enmity among the most influential figures in the land may still be characteristic of politics today.

But it is comforting to know the 17th century was probably worse - and that the duel made politics a much more dangerous battleground.