Notes on the Author - Former Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and President of the European Commission, Roy Jenkins is currently leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, Chancellor of Oxford University and President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Lord Jenkins (Asquith) has held cabinet office and is chancellor of Oxford. His Gladstone has already earned the Whitbread Award in England. Yet for American readers, his biography will often be impenetrable. W.E. Gladstone (1809-1898) was prime minister four times. The extravagances of his quintessentially Victorian genius, which included religiosity, morbidity, hypocrisy, earnestness, priggishness and oratorical excesses that make Fidel Castro seem a paragon of reticence, kept him in politics for 63 years. Jenkins's idiosyncratic account of his life lingers over parliamentary minutiae, hardly mentions the Crimean War and ignores the Indian Mutiny. Jenkins wanders off into flippancies and Anglicisms that will exasperate a transatlantic audience. We learn of "tramlines logic," of a government that was a "holed hull," of statesmen who "went of a fever." Given to pompous language when simple words would do, he refers to "eleemosynary" (charitable) motives and "fissiparous issues" (divisive would have done nicely) and compares an elongated Gladstone peroration to the close of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Still, there are redeeming descriptive and narrative gems, as in Gladstone's famed speechifying (in which subordinate clauses "hung like candelabra"), and in the energy of the old man, who at 81, knocked down by a cab, "pursued the errant driver and held him until the police came." No prime minister was more sophistical or sanctimonious, and none dominated Parliament more ruthlessly. Jenkins's biography, while sweepingly admiring, deals with his hero blemishes and all. (Feb.)
William E. Gladstone lived to be 89, spanning the 19th century almost as much as his queen, Victoria. As prime minister of Britain four times, he was involved in all the major political travails of the time, including the Crimean War, Irish Home Rule, and the expansion of British imperialism. He was energetic, a prodigious reader, a classicist who also read popular Victorian fiction, and a devoutly religious man who tortured himself with guilt over his taste for pornography. This work was first published in 1995 in England, where it was a best seller and an award-winning biography. Lord Jenkins (Life at the Center, LJ 3/1/93), a leader in the House of Lords and chancellor of Oxford University, has done a fine job of compiling a one-volume biography of a man he obviously admires. For libraries without H.C.G. Matthews's two-volume Gladstone (Oxford Univ., 1995), Jenkins's work will make a nice substitute.‘Katherine E. Gillen, Luke AFB Lib., Goodyear, Ariz.
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