Misses Something

[Larry]

Last summer's reading, it really never hit the point. Jenkins writes well of Gladstone but the "Great Man" comes off as bright but rather dull. The other parts missing from this long biography were major political issues of the times and the factors that led to Gladstone losing office on occasion. Jenkins never really covers the fact that lowering the hours that pubs could be open deeply antagonized the electorate.

In the end I felt that I got half the biography that needed to be written. It is as if the complete biography were written but worms ate out entire portions.

As a postscript though, one of the more interesting aspects of this book is that Jenkins introduced a good many new words to my vocabulary. It has been decades since a book in the English language did that!

My final assessment is that Jenkins goes into minutiae but misses the big picture, the "soul" of Gladstone. Am still waiting for the great Gladstone biography.