TILL TIME’S LAST SAND

A HISTORY OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND 1694–2013

DAVID KYNASTON Bloomsbury, 896pp, £35, Oldie price £19.97 inc p&p

Till Time’s Last Sand is the distinguished social and financial historian David Kynaston’s onevolume authorised history of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, aka The Bank of England.

How interesting could the history of a bank be? Very interesting, thought the bank’s former governor, Mervyn King.in the Spectator he wondered whether this ‘fascinating book’ might not supplant Hamilton as the West End’s hottest musical: ‘I can’t wait for David Kynaston’s new history to reach the stage […] We may have to call on Tim Rice.’ ‘War and peace, murder and executions, fraud and forgery, panics and bankruptcies (including nine governors to date), heroes and villains’: it has it all.

Iain Martin didn’t go quite so far, but in the Times he agreed the book’s

great strength was its anecdotal and human history. Kynaston ‘has no grand theory. He is not that type of historian. What the reader gets is an exemplary narrative history, with the archives plundered judiciously and plenty of focus on people and their quirks’ – everything from its eccentric clerks to the ‘tea tickets’ bank staff in the 1950s could cash in for Jacob’s Club biscuits or poached egg on toast.

Less keen was the Guardian’s John Kampfner. He hailed the ‘ultimate account’, ‘commanding’, ‘replete with detail’ and ‘meticulously researched’, but complained: ‘For reasons I cannot fathom, Kynaston chooses to denude this book of emotion and opinion’, leaving it ‘a bloodless read’.

The FT’S John Plender, didn’t find it quite bloodless enough, warning that it ‘will not be the first port of call for those who look for extended disquisitions on the 19th-century real bills doctrine or the shifting fashions in structuring the asset side of central banks’ balance sheets’. But as a history for the general reader it ‘triumphantly succeeds’.