Publishers Weekly
05/27/2019
Financial journalist and historian Grant (The Forgotten Depression) gives a thoughtful, evenhanded, and frequently witty take on one of his professional forebears: Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), a 19th-century British banker, editor-in-chief of the Economist, and a skilled writer on political and economic subjects. The subtitle is misleading—an epigraph clarifies that Bagehot was labeled “the greatest,” as in quintessential, Victorian by historian G.M. Young, not by Grant. Grant’s view is much more down-to-earth; he passionately admires Bagehot as a “virtuoso writer on money and banking” whose output was “eclectic, fearless, aphoristic, prolific” and whose ideas remain respected today, but doesn’t hesitate to point out his flaws (among them “hauteur” and “studied forgetfulness about forecasting errors”) and failures (including three unsuccessful runs for political office). Bagehot was born into a provincial business and banking dynasty; he went into one of the family businesses, the regional bank Stuckey’s. He became influential among other prominent Victorians, corresponding with and counseling such luminaries as William Gladstone; succeeding brilliantly at the Economist; and accurately predicting and warning against the numerous banking panics and runs that plagued England in the 1800s. It is a measure of Grant’s talent as a biographer that Bagehot appears as scintillating and charismatic as he is reputed to have been in life. Even readers not normally drawn to economic subjects will find themselves enjoying this lively and erudite biography and guide to financial Victoriana. (July)
The Economist
"Excellent—built on a lot of study...and written in a gripping style."
The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Schwarz
"Excellent."
The New Yorker - John Lanchester
"Lively....Entertaining."
Financial Times - John Plender
"Very enjoyable...Grant demonstrates that he has the measure of a fascinating—and great—Victorian."
Foreign Affairs - Sebastian Mallaby
"A gem of a book: entertaining, wry, and gloriously eccentric."
The Wall Street Journal - Barton Swaim
"Bagehot was a financial journalist with a love of English literature and a facility for clear and cogent prose. So is Mr. Grant.… Bagehot is a terrific and efficient survey of the political and economic disputations of mid-Victorian England."
The Times (London) - Simon Nixon
"James Grant [is] one of the most influential contemporary commentators on Wall Street.… In Grant’s hands, Bagehot’s life and career provide a superb prism through which to observe the extraordinary revolution in the British economy during the 19th century."
Mervyn King
"The most perceptive and brilliant economic and political writer of his time deserves a biographer of equal literary merit. In James Grant, Walter Bagehot has found him."
DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
For those with a serious interest in the evolution of banking, this audiobook is a must-listen despite narrator Jonathan Cowley’s lack of engagement. Walter Bagehot (pronounced "badget") was one of those multitalented Victorians whose ideas have continued to echo in the present. Although he also wrote biography, literary criticism, and political analysis, this audiobook focuses on his work as a financial writer and editor of THE ECONOMIST. There is little of his personal life in the biography; instead the work focuses on the evolution of the modern British banking system. Cowley delivers every sentence with the same cadence and overprecise diction, reducing the interest of the average listener. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-04-28
Financial journalist Grant (The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, 2014, etc.) pays homage to the founding genius of the genre, the pioneering Economist editor and capital Victorian chap.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)—as the author helpfully points out, it's pronounced "Badge-it"—was impossibly accomplished, devouring libraries of Latin literature as a child, writing literary essays as a teenager, insatiably learning, and, at his peak as a journalist, writing at least 5,000 meticulously arranged words per week. He was also largely self-taught in economics, a discipline that was then only beginning to shape itself. Grant recounts the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone's remark, "The machinery of our financial administration is complicated, and Mr. Bagehot is the only outsider who had thoroughly mastered it. Indeed, he understood the machine almost as completely as we who had to work it." The author's account is not without its complications, from the opening discussion of the British monetary system in the two-metal years to repeated encounters with financial panics and depression brought on by wishful thinking, willful error, and the inevitable bubbles and busts of the business cycle. Born into both banking and journalism, Bagehot, as editor and principal columnist for the Economist, was in a position to admonish, correct, and suggest; by Grant's account, the treasury note is one result. He was also in a position, as Grant notes, to prognosticate and imagine: "To write about finance in a useful way," writes the author, "is to take an unconventional view of the future (there's not much demand for what everybody already knows)." Bagehot's imagination led to a publication that, in his own image, was politically somewhat liberal and fiscally conservative, learned without being ponderous, and able to adapt and to admit error, all qualities that lend credence to Grant's estimation of Bagehot as one whose "words live."
Essential for readers with an interest in the history of economics and, more important, how to write about and read the dismal science.
