About the Author

Ralf Dahrendorf (Lord Dahrendorf) is a former Director of the LSE and now Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of over 40 books, including Class and Conflict in Industrial Society (1959), and The Modern Social Conflict (1988)

Reviews

`a warm, generous, affectionate, and personal history of LSE'
Albion
`t is scrupulously researched, a jungle book of scrumptiously private inside information... - I found LSE compelling reading and often emotionally stirring.'
Daily Telegraph
`Lord Dahrendorf's history is worthy of its subject and does justice to a great international institution...very readable volume'
Times Higher Education Supplement
`His enthusasm for the institution is obvious in this very enjoyable centenary history, but he is always judicious - for example, in his excellent account of "the troubles" in the mid-60's...It has had its ups and downs and Dahrendorf gives a clear chronological account of them.'
Financial Times
will be of special interest to political scientists ... Dahrendorf well captures the special spirit of LSE ... Particularly for those of us who were at LSE as students or as teachers, this centenary volume will be cherished as a reminder of an institution that commands peculiar loyalties from those associated with it.
`There is an impressive quantity of scholarship; a truly vast number of relevant facts amassed. There is no padding; the interesting facts jostle each other, all have a legitimate claim on the available space;'
The Times Literary Supplement
`Ralf Dahrendorf strikes gold in his centenary history of the London School of Economics...a compelling story of the building of a 20th-century urban intellectual community.'
The Observer
`he epitomises the LSE's internationalism, its prodigious intellectual appetite, its quizzical social democracy, its quest for power through knowledge. He tells an often gripping tale with high intelligence, panache and generosity.'
Sunday Telegraph
`the author, having been both student and Director of the School is uniquely qualified to write its history ... There is an impressive quantity of scholarship: A truly vast number of relevant facts amassed. There is no padding; the interesting facts jostle each other, all have a legitimate claim in the available space.'
The Hindu
`splendidly readable history of the school'
New Statesman and Society
`the history of the School is lovingly chronicled with empathy and clear intelligence.'
Contemporary Review
`...the history of the School is lovingly chronicled with empathy and clear intelligence.'
Contemporary Review
`should appeal to a large general readership, because it records far more than the collective life of a world-famous institution ... Dahrendorf deals critically and amusingly, though always fairly, with legendary LSE characters'
John Grigg, Sunday Telegraph
`a highly readable history of one of the premier social science institutions in the world...This is narrative educational history at its best. The book is well written, with excellent and well-chosen photographs...Must reading for anyone interested in the history of the social sciences.'
Choice 33:4
`I recommend this book for several related reasons to all who are curious about a unique establishment. It tackles the realities and the myths of the LSE...the LSE did well to choose Dahredorf as its centennial historian. He knows the place from within and from the top...Dahrendorf's detailed narrative of the Beveridge autocracy will probably remain the definitive account.'
Government and Opposition 31:1
`a scholarly centennial history of the London School of Economics and Political Science ... The work makes excellent use of the LSE archives and other manuscript collections'
American Historical Review, February 1997
`this is the best essay in institutional history that I have ever read ... Dahrendorf has given us a masterly review of the first century.'
A.H. Halsey, Nuffield College, Oxford. EHR Sept. 96
`the general reader will be ... concerned with the account of the School's efforts to decide what social science is and how it should be practised, which Dahrendorf is probably better equipped than anybody to describe. and which he does describe with much skill ... centenaries demand centenary histories, and this intelligent, involved, lively and readable history is worthy of the occasion.'
John Davis, The Queen's College, Oxford, C20 British History, Vol. 8, No. 1 '97