1834–1902 · English historian, moralist & Liberal politician
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902), was an English Catholic historian and Liberal politician renowned for his encyclopaedic command of European history and his insistence that rulers be judged by the same moral standard as everyone else. He planned a monumental “History of Liberty” that he never wrote, and became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895. Today he is remembered chiefly for this single sentence.