`To be warmly welcomed...skilfully inserting itself as it does into a historical vacuum which has never been satisfactorily filled.'

`[Pearce] is utterly at home in the... Augustan political
culture... [alert] to the deep continuities between then and now'.

`Pearce is a magnificent historian, and his biography [...] is
superb. Pearce is [...] a profound and meticulous scholar.'

`Edward Pearce, an accomplished political historian and
biographer, provides a lively account of Walpole's public career'

'This is serious history...consistently illuminated by Pearce's sharp
prose'

'richly detailed, stylistically ornate and littered with eccentric asides'

'[an] elegant and insightful account of the...addictions of power'

`Pearce describes the helter-skelter of domestic and foreign
policy admirably...Masterly'

'Few political writers can collapse half a dozen ideas into a
single, dense yet witty sentence with such elegance'

'Pearce's background as a lobby journalist makes him peculiarly
suited to deciphering the intricacies of early 18th century parliamentary
life.'

2008-06-21 Unreadable

I have to agree with some of the previous comments: unreadable, and shame on you Edward Pearce. I was about 30 pages in when I found myself checking to see if the book had been published by a major publishing house and had had an editor, or if, as it seemed to me, it had been a piece of un-edited vanity publishing. I was quite shocked to see it was under the imprint of Jonanthan Cape - shame on them too!

Pearce says in his introduction that he really enjoyed writing this book, and I think this is probably the key to what is wrong with it. His approach seems to be to plough through sources and put down every tid bit he personally finds interesting, and not do the work thinking through how to present a coherent narrative. Rather than using detail to add colour to a scholarly perspective on a complex subject, he rattles off page after page of detail, principally the actions of lots of bit-players in the parliamentary politics of the time, and seems to think that scholarship consists of drawing clunking analogies to modern British politics or offering waspish judgements of the character flaws of these many bit-players.

The unreadability comes from a combination of countless new names appearing every page, devoid of narrative context, written in a style of knowing, meandering sentences where Pearce cannot resist any temptation to make an ex-cathedra judgement or a waspish aside.

And as has been commented already, Walpole himself is almost completely absent from the book. I gave up at page 150, but by then there was barely the slightest sense for the man Walpole, his character, his personal life, the nature of his friendships etc. Quite strange really, and I think testament to the lack of real work put in by Pearce. It is a very difficult task to bring a man and his time to life in a few hundred pages, and there is a real art to writing a good historical biography. To say this doesn't even begin to get close is an understatement.