Oddly, although this is a reference book and not intended to be read for pleasure, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to getting the others in the series. It’s a series of one-or-two page biographies of the familiar – William Pitt, Jane Austen, Wellington, Byron – and many less familiar.


Some things struck me:


*Napoleon and the French Revolution had the same fascination for the “best and brightest” of the time that Communism had in ours. However, they got over it, while we’re still saddled with cryptoMarxists.


*A surprising number of people committed suicide. I wonder if drug overdose has replaced the straight razor as the final solution to despair among the famous?


*There are no entrepreneurs; a few of the people mentioned had made some money “in trade”, but they’re here because of subsequent philanthropic, political or artistic activity. On the other hand, there are a number of people who started out in the lower classes – Wolfe Tone, William Cobbett, Robert Burns, John Clare, Thomas Telford, John Dalton, Sir Humphrey Davy – and achieved fame (or, in Tone’s case, infamy) through their talent.


*A number of engineers and inventors are included: Stephenson, Trevithick, McAdam, Rennie, Maudslay. It’s gratifying to see them recognized by historians, who sometimes seem to concentrate on politicians (there’s a famous American history text that does not mention Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers but has several paragraphs on Joseph McCarthy).


The book does have some drawbacks. The entries are chronological by career: early politicians, later politicians, early poets, later poets, etc. This makes it difficult to look someone up - you can go to the index, of course, but since the book was not intended to be read as a history I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t have been alphabetical. I suppose the author was thinking of “parallel lives”; it might make sense to juxtapose the careers of William Pitt and Charles Fox this way, but it doesn’t work very well elsewhere. You are also expected to be familiar with British history; it’s assumed that you know what the Reform Bill was about and what the Corn Laws were. Nevertheless there’s plenty of interesting people in here and the format makes it easy to pick up and read a biography or two. I’m anxious to get the others in the series. ( )

This is a surprisingly good and useful book. I was reluctant to buy this at first. Now I wish I had bought the entire series. Perhaps in these days of Wikipedia such books seem less useful than before. But I still value and rely upon the accuracy of this book more than the open source of Wikipedia. ( )