Sir John Plumb : the hidden life of a great historian : a personal memoir / by Neil McKendrick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKendrick, Neil, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plumb, J. H. (John Harold), 1911-2001.

Plumb, J. H.

Historians--Great Britain--Biography.

Historians.

Great Britain.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 274 pages, xiv pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Brighton, Sussex, England : Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019.

Summary:

Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb (1911-2001) was a great British historian. He led an extraordinary life of startling contrasts, much of it cloaked in secrecy. This memoir attempts to lift that cloak. This is a very personal account written by Neil McKendrick, a fellow historian, a fellow Master of a Cambridge college and one his oldest and closest friends, who knew Plumb from his early days to his dying hours some fifty years after they first met. This new memoir depicts a startlingly revelatory portrait of a complex and controversial man who moved from poverty to great affluence; from beginning his life in a two-up two-down terrace house in Leicester to end it in what was called 'Jack's Palace' surrounded by a world-class collection of Vincennes and Sèvres. Plumb's personality was sufficiently beguiling to attract the attention of four significant novelists who left six vivid if unflattering fictional versions of him depicting him as a ruthless charmer, a serial bisexual philanderer and, most bizarrely of all, as a murderer planning a further murder. In truth the real man needed no fictional elaboration to make him unusually interesting. In fact his life is often astonishing. The historian, who achieved such international eminence that, on the direct order of the US President and after a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Congress on his 80th birthday to do honour to the historian who had taught the American people so much, was no run of the mill academic. -- Provided by publisher.

Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb (1911-2001) was a great British historian. He led an extraordinary life of startling contrasts, much of it cloaked in secrecy. This memoir attempts to lift that cloak. This is a very personal account written by Neil McKendrick, a fellow historian, a fellow Master of a Cambridge college and one his oldest and closest friends, who knew Plumb from his early days to his dying hours some fifty years after they first met. This new memoir depicts a startlingly revelatory portrait of a complex and controversial man who moved from poverty to great affluence; from beginning his life in a two-up two-down terrace house in Leicester to end it in what was called 'Jack's Palace' surrounded by a world-class collection of Vincennes and Sèvres. Plumb's personality was sufficiently beguiling to attract the attention of four significant novelists who left six vivid if unflattering fictional versions of him depicting him as a ruthless charmer, a serial bisexual philanderer and, most bizarrely of all, as a murderer planning a further murder. In truth the real man needed no fictional elaboration to make him unusually interesting. In fact his life is often astonishing. The historian, who achieved such international eminence that, on the direct order of the US President and after a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Congress on his 80th birthday to do honour to the historian who had taught the American people so much, was no run of the mill academic.

Other Format:

Ebook version :

ISBN:

9781911454830

1911454838

OCLC:

1108706585