Search Results

“... This, if I understand it, is one of those golden moments of our history; one of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return, or, if they return, return at long intervals, and under circumstances which no man can forecast.’ Thus Gladstone, unsuccessfully commending to the Commons the first Home Rule Bill, for Ireland, in 1886, a Bill which set the terms of discussion about major constitutional change in the United Kingdom and established categories which remain remarkably unchanged today, as we face up to Scottish and Welsh devolution ...”

“... volumes which Gladstone records having read. The publication of the diary, masterminded by Colin Matthew, who has devoted over half an academic career to it, has transformed our view of Gladstone. In successive introductions, Matthew has set out a subtle yet lucid analysis of all aspects of his public and private life, and ...”

“... acknowledges the assistance of others, notably the editor of the Gladstone diaries, H.C.G. Matthew, Jenkins has extended himself formidably over seven hundred pages, displaying a sure grasp of a mass of baffling detail. He is the first biographer to draw on all 13 fat volumes of the published edition of the diaries: an incomparable source which he ...”

“... prove anything. That is equally true of Gladstone. The seventh and eighth volume of Dr Colin Matthew’s learned and authoritative edition of the Diaries of that extraordinary figure reveal a very strange relationship between the Prime Minister and a high-class ex-courtesan called Mrs Thistlethwaite, who had become a convert to ...”

“... abound for diary editing which is informative but not heavy-handed, as in the edition by H.C.G. Matthew of Gladstone, or by Ion Trewin of Alan Clark. The diaries have been crunched down to 200,000 words from a holograph four times that length, though a certain amount of pooterism and triviality remains. We learn that Mullin usually eats beans on toast in ...”

“... and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his monumental edition of the Gladstone diaries. Matthew became the founding editor of the ODNB in 1992, and much of the credit for both the conception and the early ...”