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Piers Brendon is the author of a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, and The Windsors, Hawker of Morwenstow and, most recently, The Dark Valley, a hugely acclaimed history of the 1930s, which are all available in Pimlico. He also writes for television and contributes regularly to the national press. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
First published in 1979, this edition of Piers Brendon's readable book is prefaced with a new introduction by the author. In it he explains that he follows Lytton Strachey's example in Eminent Victorians of choosing figures who represent their age and whose lives illustrate its values and preoccupations. The first part of the book is devoted to the newspaper baron and great eccentric Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, whose energy and influence were legendary. Brendon traces his rise to power and analyses the way he regarded anything and everything as worthy of sensationalizing. Balfour is perhaps the least known of the four personages selected and yet his political career kept him in the public eye from the end of the 19th century until after the Great War. He served as Prime Minister and as foreign secretary and is best remembered for the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which His Majesty's Government stated that they 'viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. A portrait emerges of a man of contradictions for, in private, he expressed anti-Semitic views. A dandy, a clever speaker whose bored manner possibly concealed a cold heart, he is shown to epitomize the power and selfishness of the landed gentry. Piers Brendon writes for the general reader, delighting in anecdotes and amusing quotations. He has a gift for selecting the small details that stick in the reader's mind. In his description of Mrs Pankhurst he emphasizes how a woman who was fastidious, beautiful and dainty as any orthodox Edwardian lady demonstrated the fury of a true zealot. Her story makes chilling reading and is quite different from the story of Baden-Powell, who viewed women, along with wine and highbrows, as one of life's major snags. Baden-Powell is a gift to such a biographer with his character and exploits 'drawn straight out of the Boys' Own Paper' but although Brendon is very amused by the man he is fair and balances the extraordinary tales of pig-sticking and kaffir-beating with praise for his achievements in setting up the Scout movement. These four short biographies sum up the Edwardian era with wit and vigour. (Kirkus UK)
