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Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman who Shaped Modern Britain
Engaging biography of an establishment technocrat
CATALYST: Richard Haldane’s caricatured as ‘Hegelian politician’ by Leslie ‘Spy’ Ward in Vanity Fair, 1896

MEMO to my reviewing self: don’t always judge a book by its fly-leaf blurb — as a result of doing just that, I very nearly threw this brick on RB Haldane into the bin.

Its author, John Campbell, is the co-founder of an international private equity and infrastructure house and this would appear to be his first, rather patrician, foray into biography.

He’s so grand that he has a little helper who is also credited as a collaborator. One assumes Richard McLauchlan was the date and fact-check grunt, but I might be maligning him.

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