Description
Book SynopsisThe spirited and measured memoir of Walter Bagehot, had he left one
Trade Review“[Prochaska] has done a remarkable job . . . What he has accomplished is a quiet tour de force, often tightening and (if it is permitted to say so) improving on the original . . . Frank Prochaska has shone an agreeable and revelatory light upon this great Victorian writer by an artful deployment of literary mirrors, not lanterns. The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot is a testimony not only to his command of the Bagehot oeuvre but also to his deep understanding of Bagehot’s curious place in the pantheon of that endangered species, the man of letters.”—Roger Kimball, Literary Review
-- Roger Kimball * Literary Review *
“A brief and eminently readable introduction to a stimulating writer and thinker, a man for whom the term 'public intellectual' may have been coined.”—Gertrude Himmelfarb,
The Weekly Standard -- Gertrude Himmelfarb * The Weekly Standard *
“An ambitious ‘reconstruction’ . . . Augustine Birrell, the English politician and belle-lettrist, put the matter as plainly as Bagehot himself might have: "To know Walter Bagehot through his books," he said, "is one of the good things of life." And so is knowing Bagehot through these ‘Memoirs.’”—George Selgin,
The Wall Street Journal -- George Selgin * The Wall Street Journal *
“As far as I can check, pretty much everything in this little book is direct quotation, with only minimal editorial linking. So you will probably get as good a picture of what Bagehot was like and what he thought from Prochaska’s two hundred pages as from St John Steva’s 15 volumes. Prochaska picks out the plums nicely, and the ripest and juiciest are usually Bagehot’s remarks on the world he really knew from the inside, the world of money.”—Ferdinand Mount, London Review of Books
-- Ferdinand Mount * London Review of Books *
