Uma Biografia de Walter Bagehot

Um dos grandes personagens vitorianos finalmente ganha alguma atenção com uma nova biografia: THE MEMOIRS OF WALTER BAGEHOT By Frank Prochaska. Yale Univ. Press. 207 pp. $38. Na resenha de Martin Walker lemos: Bagehot’s admirers have been many and illustrious. For Margaret Thatcher, “He was, perhaps, the most distinguished of all financial journalists.” Britain’s great Liberal prime minister William Gladstone, a personal friend, wrote that Bagehot was “a man of most remarkable gifts,” and for the historian G. M. Young, he was simply “the greatest Victorian.” Perhaps his biggest fan was Woodrow Wilson, who leaned heavily on Bagehot’s constitutional writings in composing his own Congressional Government (1885). For America’s 28th president, Bagehot was both wit and seer: “Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of his generation, and to vivify it; to give it speed where it is slow, vision where it is blind, balance where it is out of poise, saving humour where it is dry—and such a man was Walter Bagehot.”