Till Time's Last Sand

Kynaston's aim is to provide a history of the Bank for the general reader and in this he triumphantly succeeds, providing a worthy complement to the notable series of books on different periods of the Bank's history ... wonderfully readable -- John Plender * Financial Times * The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has been waiting for a biographer who could do justice to the richness of her story ... This is the work of a scholar with a gift for illuminating every square inch of each enormous canvas he chooses to paint ... Kynaston brings characters large and small to life ... I, for one, will hope for a second edition in a decade or so's time -- Martin Vander Weyer * Literary Review * This mammoth history of the Bank of England is full of human detail ... What the reader gets is an exemplary narrative history, with the archives plundered judiciously and plenty of focus on people and their quirks ... Kynaston has produced a fascinating accompaniment to his four-volume history of the City. His portrait of a globally influential institution is rendered on an entertainingly human scale -- Iain Martin * The Times * A triumph ... this portrait of the Bank of England really is fascinating, at times even gripping -- Simon Heffer * Sunday Telegraph * Kynaston is a masterly storyteller and has made the material as accessible as it could possibly be to the non-specialist ... It is through allowing actors, great and small, to have their say, that Kynaston conveys the complex culture of the Bank -- Robert Skidelsky * Prospect * Kynaston's access to the bank's archives - this is the official history, commissioned by the then governor Mervyn King in 2009 - yields tremendous detail ... This archive-led approach ... yield[s] details no other historian of the bank has hitherto discovered -- Dominic Lawson * Sunday Times * As David Kynaston makes clear in an engaging and absorbing account of its history, the Bank is an enigmatically hybrid creature, like a centaur or sphinx - a hybrid that has undergone significant mutations over three centuries of adaptation and evolution ... Although the arc of Kynaston's narrative is one of rising prosperity in the long term, this is a story punctuated by popping bubbles, major swindles, banking bailouts, sterling devaluations and squeezes on liquidity, which become themselves the matter of his drama -- Colin Kidd * Guardian * It is a part of Kynaston's huge achievement that such moments of insight and pleasure should accompany what has become a monumental history of our recent past -- Praise for 'Modernity Britain' * The Times * David Kynaston is one of the great chroniclers of our modern story ... Every paragraph contains some glittering nugget -- Praise for 'Modernity Britain' * Sunday Times * A historian of peerless sensitivity and curiosity about the lives of individuals. His method is to immerse first himself, then his readers, in a deep quotidian fabric of the time, making every strand visible before gradually lifting his gaze and revealing the wider pattern -- Praise for 'Modernity Britain' * Financial Times * Kynaston's project is already being acclaimed as one of the great achievements of modern history -- Praise for 'Modernity Britain' * Daily Telegraph * Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face -- Praise for 'Modernity Britain' * Hilary Mantel, Observer * Magnificent * Observer *