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  The Oxford Book of British Political Anecdotes, edited by Paul Johnson
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Our Price: $9.10

Condition: See product description
Make/Author/Artist: Paul Johnson, edited by
Details: Hardcover with Dust Jacket

Quantity in Stock:1

Product Code: POLANE

Description
 
Renowned journalist and best-selling author Paul Johnson here presents some 300 anecdotes and guides the reader along with the succinct and informative commentaries from Richard III's murder of the princes in the Tower of London to a final frosty scene between Jim Callaghan and Barbara.

The stories range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the wicked to the sobering, from the gratifying to the positively alarming.  Here's Lloyd's George's assessment of Church Hill he would make a drum out of the skin of his mother in order to sound his own praises, and Henry VIII is tireless rewriting of his secretaries work, he ordered that drafts have 2 1/2 inch margins and inch wide spaces between the lines to leave room for his changes, and Queen Mary, the II's brave death from smallpox and more.

The brilliance and flaws of statesmen and politicians; Sir Thomas more, Cromwell, Sir Robert Walpole, Gladstone, Disraeli, and Atlee among them, are recorded by their contemporaries in journals and letters, and parliamentary records, and by later biographies.

Funerals, battles in parliament, an interview with a journalist turned forger, dinner and garden parties, the visit of a lecherous former American president, Atlee's reaction to being overtaken by a dangerous driver who proves to be his wife: the stories entertained as they provide new historical perspective.

As Johnson convincingly demonstrates in his introduction, anecdotes have proved to be a valuable source of historical truth. Details may be altered or distorted, and occasionally lost in the romance of invention, but more often than not, in essentials, they prove accurate and telling.  And it is the stories - strange, eccentric, personal - that we remember long after the dates of battles and monarchs have gone out of our heads.

Condition: hardcover with dust jacket, used lightly, Oxford University press, New York 1986, 270 pages including index.

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