Political Observer explores the available resources !
Aug 23, 2025
Headline: Britain | Bagehot
What it means when Britain talks about “Bosh”
A desperate political class is out of ideas
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/08/20/what-it-means-when-britain-talks-about-bosh
Editor: This weak attempt at humor, wedded to a critical evaluation of ‘the British version of “The Apprentice”, uses an etiolated, vulgerised version of Bagehot! The Oxbridgers have reached a point of desperation?
Editor: An exploration of Bagehot is in order. Reader look at the available resources!
The ‘Greatest Victorian’ Is Largely Forgotten. His Biographer Wants to Change That
Posthumous illustration of Walter BagehotCredit…via W.W. Norton
By Benjamin Schwarz
July 23, 2019
BAGEHOT
The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
By James Grant
…
Grant is a biographer of Bernard Baruch and John Adams, and the founder and editor of the cheeky and stylish Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. The characterization that the highbrow Labour Party politician Richard Crossman (another Bagehot devotee) bestowed on Bagehot’s writing — a “mixture of rollicking cynicism and cool analysis” — applies to Grant’s own brilliantly contrarian criticism in the Interest Rate Observer, The Financial Times and elsewhere of market recklessness, bankers’ irresponsibility and (to Grant) their concomitant, the expansive monetary policies of the Federal Reserve that have defined the booms and busts of the past 30-odd years.
This biography, though, takes wing only when it treats Bagehot’s role as a banker and financial journalist. That these are the very aspects of Bagehot’s work that have been relatively neglected by most scholars, who have tended to concentrate on his literary, political and sociological oeuvre, might be reason enough to commend Grant’s excellent if uneven biography. Bagehot scholarship, however, isn’t accretive, and the 1959 book “The Spare Chancellor,” by the worldly British journalist Alastair Buchan, remains the most astute, elegant and historically informed assessment of Bagehot’s entire life and work — including his participation in and analysis of the powerful and precarious world of finance.
Culture | Study of a sage
A new biography of Walter Bagehot, “the greatest Victorian”
And The Economist’s greatest editor
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4351/4351-h/4351-h.htm
Alexander Zevin is an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and an editor at New Left Review.
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