Peter Clarke (1) (1942–)

5223. Hope and Glory Britain 1900-2000, by Peter Clarke (read 9 Jan 2018) This book does a good job telling of English history from 1900 to 2002. I found it consistently interesting although some of the data on intricate English statistics is not readily comprehensible to somebody like me who has never lived in England. The book does not deal with British foreign affairs to any great extent, but is very concentrated on British politics and how events affected English life. For instance, the events of the two World Wars which occurred outside Britain are not closely reviewed. But that was OK wih me and I found the account of the political events in Britain after 1945 full of interest and informative in a way that we in the USA are not usually told about. But if British politics interests one, as it does me, this book is a winner.… (more)

I received this book for free as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.

This is a fun little book, and by little, I mean just long enough to cover the life of John Maynard Keynes, while still clocking in under 200 pages, not counting endnotes and bibliography. I find the life of Keynes fascinating, and I genuinely learned things by reading this biography. For example, Keynes' literary friends in his Bloomsbury circle were genuinely mystified that he chose to marry a ballerina. Also, he and his wife wanted kids, but suffered from infertility.

Yet, I'm not sure I can really recommend this book. I've had this book for eight years, and I've read it three times trying to review it. I think the problem is the material is not quite chronological, and not quite topical, but rather a kind of stream-of-consciousness combination of the two. It makes it really hard to form a coherent picture of the life and times of Maynard Keynes, which is the only reason I want to read a book like this. I took to making notes in the margin to document what year an event happened, so I could reconstruct a timeline of events that are close in time but spread across chapters.

If you just want a fun read with a few facts sprinkled in, then this probably won't bother you. On the other hand, if you like to place things in perspective, then this book makes that unnecessarily hard.… (more)

I won this off goodreads, which just goes to prove that those get a free book competitions actually give out free books. That said, this was pretty blah. Clarke's a very nice writer, so it's easy to read. But that's about the best I can say- the biographical stuff was fine, but there was very little about the Fall or Return of this Influential Economist. And the book doesn't really explain why he was so influential until the last chapter... and even then doesn't do a very good job. Was his major innovation really convincing people that investment could lead to savings rather than the other way round? Really? The *General Theory* gets all of two pages. I'm sure there are better biographies; I hope to hell there are better intellectual biographies. But it's short enough to read in an afternoon, and I'm encouraged enough that I'd want to read other things written by Peter Clarke which require a little less explanation of complicated ideas, i.e., his history of 20th century Britain.… (more)