Prologue: "With devouring fury" -- "Large, wild, fiery, black" -- "In mirth and refutation; in ridicule and laughter" -- "Vive la guillotine" -- The literary banker -- "The ruin inflicted on innocent creditors" -- "The young gentleman out of Miss Austen's novels" -- A death in India -- The "problem" of W.E. Gladstone -- "Therefore, we entirely approve" -- "The muddy slime of Bagehot's crotchets and heresies" -- The great scrum of reform -- A loser by seven bought votes -- By "influence and corruption" -- "In the first rank" -- Never a bullish word -- Government bears the cost -- "I wonder what my eminence is?"

"The definitive biography of a banker, essayist, and editor of the Economist, by an acclaimed financial historian. During the upheavals of 2007-9, 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, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that--decades later--inspired the radical responses to the world's worst financial crises. In James Grant's colorful and groundbreaking biography, Bagehot appears as both an ornament to his own age and a muse to our own. Brilliant and precocious, he was influential in political circles, making high-profile friends, including William Gladstone--and enemies: Lord Overstone, Benjamin Disraeli. As an essayist on wide-ranging topics, he won the admiration of Matthew Arnold and Woodrow Wilson. He was also a misogynist, and while he opposed slavery, he misjudged Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. As editor of the Economist, he offered astute commentary on the financial issues of his day, and his name lives on in an eponymous weekly column"--