Eminent Edwardians: Four Figures who Defined their Age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell

by Piers Brendon

Astute, witty, and mercifully brief, Eminent Edwardians is a portrait of an age. Piers Brendon reveals the essence of the Edwardian era in biographical sketches of four of its most famous figures: Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister and inspirer of the Balfour Declaration on Palestine; Emmeline Pankhurst, dare-devil Suffragette and “castrating threat to the lords of humankind”; Robert Baden-Powell, war idol and “eternal Boy Scout”; and grandiose newspaper baron Lord Alfred Northcliffe, who unleashed on an unsuspecting world a mass popular press.

Genres: History, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Piers Brendon was educated at Shrewsbury School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read History. From 1965–1978, he was Lecturer in History, then Principal Lecturer and Head of Department, at what is now the Anglia Polytechnic University. From 1979 onwards he has worked as a free-lance writer of books, journalism and for television. From 1995 he has been a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and was Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre from 1995 to 2001

Reviews

[Trin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought on a whim at a used bookstore in New Orleans, read in its entirety on the plane ride home, which comprised a lengthy layover in the Las Vegas airport with its soundtrack of slot machines trilling and jangling. Quite a contrast. But I remember really enjoying this. The style is (deliberately) overwrought, with Brendon half-aping Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and half, I think, sincerely copying it. So these are cutting biographies of Edwardian figures. I have no idea as to their accuracy or the quality of Brendon's analysis, but they sure were fun to read.

[Al Berry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short 60-80 biographies on 4 eminent edwardians with the goal of showing them to be deeply flawed individuals Harmsworth the newspaper magnate, Balfour the Politican, Pankhurst the Suffragette, Baden-Powell the war hero. However, they are like unfulfilling appetizers. Additionally, the writing style is tiresome and not as engaging as it could be.