Portraits and Miniatures

by Roy Jenkins

In Portraits and Miniatures, Roy Jenkins brings his penetrating intelligence and elegant prose to subjects ranging from literature and political history to wine and croquet. Long experience in both Houses of Parliament and as President of the European Commission has given him unparalleled insight into political figures such as R. A. Butler, Aneurin Bevan, Konrad Adenauer, and de Gaulle. A varied selection of essays, Portraits and Miniatures is fascinating, witty, and endlessly entertaining.

Genres: Nonfiction

322 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 1993

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM PC was a Welsh politician. Once prominent as a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) and government minister in the 1960s and 1970s, he became the first (and so far only) British President of the European Commission (1977-81) and one of the four principal founders of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. He was also a distinguished writer, especially of biographies.

-Wikipedia

Reviews

[Harry Balden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written vignettes about middle ranking British politicans of the 1950s-80s

[David C Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Profiles and occasional pieces by the English politician and biographer as well as chancellor of Oxford. Jenkins is a very smooth writer but journalism encourages him occasionally to glibness with style substituting for substance; his piece on Newman and the Idea of a university doesn’t say much about either and cannot have taken as much agony to prepare as Jenkins claims it did for him, a non expert. He is shrewd though, observing that the formidable WASP Dean Acheson was not an Anglophile, as he’s seen in the USA, but modeled what a statesman should look like for the English if they’d only harden up.
Also: Labor leaders and near namesakes Ernest Bevin and Nye Bevan were antagonistic rivals and the former said of the latter: “His own worst enemy? Not while I’m alive he ain’t.”

[foundfoundfound]

was there anyone in the long history of english politics so engagingly oleaginous, or so effortlessly comfortable at high table as jenkins?