Haldane martin biography of albert

PARLIAMENTS, ESTATES & REPRESENTATION BOOK REVIEW Haldane: the forgotten statesman who shaped Britain and Canada, by John Campbell, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020, xxxviii + 483 pp., £30 (cloth), ISBN 9780228000938 Through his relationships with their authors, the subject of this volume was responsible both for the writing of Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol and the dissemination of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

An MP, a QC, and eventually a viscount, his writ ran from transforming the provision of education, the machinery of government, the army, parliamentary institutions and the legal system. His recommendations – a supreme court, a lord speaker – are still being implemented.

Yet, ‘sadly’, there is ‘no niche in the pantheon’ (199) for this large – in every sense – figure, ‘[n]owhere is his statue to be found’ (343). It is the central contention of this book – to put ‘right’ that which is wrong (3) – that its subject wa