Product Description

Jenkins looks at the lives and careers of the nineteen men who were Chancellor of the Exchequer between Gladstone's last appointment to the office and Attlee's last. Looks at the personalities, their social backgrounds and their effect on the country at the time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #628700 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 500 pages

Customer Reviews

Easy style and conclusions
Jenkins writes with an easy style and draws the reader in well. Each of these is a masterly example of popular historical writing in which the reader is made to feel how each chancellor functioned and how successful he was. Jenkins's writing style is perhaps the most impressive thing about this book- he is always emollient and smooth. One warning ought to be given about this book and that is that it basically only covers the last quarter of the 19th Century and first half of the twentieth- we have here essays on the chancellors from Randolph Churchill (1886) to Hugh Dalton (1945-7).

As for his history, after Gladstone a piece of work which was severely inadequate compared to other treatments of the Prime Minister by scholars such as Colin Matthew, Jenkins's work is always slightly suspect. You have the suspicion here as well that each chancellor is filtered through the gaze of a 20th Century liberal. Having said that Jenkins is detailed and has a canny eye for the substrata of politics.

Overall though this is a good introduction to a series of subjects who deserve to be better known- whether they were flashes that lit up the night sky (Randolph Churchill) and then faded to nothing or politicians who influenced half a century and more of policy development (Lyold George, Winston Churchill) they are all interesting people.

A concise collection of essays
The Chancellors provides a series of biographical essays on the British Chancellors at the end of the 19th and during the first half of the 20th centuries. Jenkins has chosen not to treat each Chancellor in the same way, given differences in the careers of each man. Thus there is no attempt to offer a biography of Churchill in a brief essay, but the analysis of Simon is expanded to include more than just his tenure of 11 Downing Street. The essays do make cross references to one another, but can essentially be treated as stand alone works.

Jenkins' style of biography was, of course, honed over the years, and though these essays may not live quite to the standard of his longer works ("Gladstone", for instance) they remain enjoyable. There is a certain amount of contemporary analogy in some of the pieces, which may date the book (and certainly did not tend to appear in Jenkins' other works), but this in no way detracts from an objective and scholarly set of essays.

A good set of scholarly essays
The Chancellors provides a series of biographical essays on the British Chancellors at the end of the 19th and during the first half of the 20th centuries. Jenkins has chosen not to treat each Chancellor in the same way, given differences in the careers of each man. Thus there is no attempt to offer a biography of Churchill in a brief essay, but the analysis of Simon is expanded to include more than just his tenure of 11 Downing Street. The essays do make cross references to one another, but can essentially be treated as stand alone works.

Jenkins' style of biography was, of course, honed over the years, and though these essays may not live quite to the standard of his longer works ("Gladstone", for instance) they remain enjoyable. There is a certain amount of contemporary analogy in some of the pieces, which may date the book (and certainly did not tend to appear in Jenkins' other works), but this in no way detracts from an objective and scholarly set of essays.