ELEVEN PRIME MINISTERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22326, 28 July 1934, Page 4

ELEVEN PRIME MINISTERS

" What -Manner of Men ? ” By E. Thornton Cook. Illustrated. London: Heath C'ranton. (Us net.) This book, despite an impressive bibliogrnphy, which reminds us that its author, is a useful researcher, contains sketches so perfunctory that they can only be described as potted biographies. At that, the ingredients consist as much of the thin gravy of gossip, the insubstantial gelatin of casual incident, as of more sustaining nutriment. In short, there is little “meat” in, “What Manner of Men?” The author appears to have been extraordinarily fearful _of boring her readers, and her hurried, short-clipped paragraphs give the effect of a fire o, squibs rather than bullets. For'instance, Disraeli is sent on a foreign tour: —

But the novel brought in shekels, if not enough to free Disraeli from his debts, at least sufficient to send him abroad again. Malta, Gibraltar, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, lie travelled them all. delighting in the sensation created by his appearance.

And the purchase of the Suez shares is disposed of in a few lines: — The Khedive needed money; Disraeli slipped into the field, borrowed four millions from Rothschild, and secured the Suez Canal shares. “ They are yours. Madam! ” he wrote to the Queen.

The first sketch, of the present Prime Minister of Great Britain, is perhaps the best, but it also is unnecessarily cursory, In all, Mrs Thornton Cook writes of eleven men, the distinguished line of British Prime Ministers from Disraeli and Gladstone to Baldwin and MacDonald. The book is rounded out with good photographic portraits, and should prove of use to readers whose interest in political personalities is strictly confined. One wonders at the author’s attributing the aphorism concerning fooling all of the people all of the time to Abraham Lincoln. Surely the originator was aijother American of some prominence, Phineas Taylor Barnum? J. M.