The authorised history of the Bank of England by the bestselling David Kynaston, ‘the most entertaining historian alive’ (Spectator).
David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written nineteen books, including The City of London, a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and WG's Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman v. Players match at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945–51, Family Britain, 1951–57 and Modernity Britain, 1957-1959, the first three titles in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945–79) under the collective title 'Tales of a New Jerusalem'. He is currently a visiting professor at Kingston University.
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
*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
*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
*The Times*
A triumph … this portrait of the Bank of England really is
fascinating, at times even gripping
*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
*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
*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
*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
*The Times*
David Kynaston is one of the great chroniclers of our modern story
... Every paragraph contains some glittering nugget
*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
*Financial Times*
Kynaston’s project is already being acclaimed as one of the great
achievements of modern history
*Daily Telegraph*
Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face
*Hilary Mantel, Observer*
Magnificent
*Observer*
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