Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

During the upheavals of 2007-09, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the still-canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that-decades later-inspired the radical responses to the world's worst financial crises.



Born in the small market town of Langport, just after the Panic of 1825 swept across En...