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"A valuable account of the life of the author of the 'Commentaries' on the Laws of England, the first comprehensive and reliable guide to the common law, but who is otherwise unknown to recent generations...Prest describes Blackstone's academic, barristerial and judicial careers with scholarly detail and insight." - Times Online
"...a splendidly controlled and fascinating story of a major historical figure who has never had anything like such treatment before...richly documented, unwaveringly fair but never constrained by the relative lack of personal sources, and above all judicious, indeed magisterial, albeit with numerous human touches..." - Professor Paul Langford, Lincoln College, Oxford
"There is much to commend in Wilfrid Prest's biography..." - H. T. Dickinson, Times Literary Supplement, February 2009
"...an exceptionally well-written and absorbing study..." - David Womersley, The Social Affairs Unit, July 27 2009
'...a fascinating account of the man and the eighteenth-century social, political and legal milieu in which he lived.... Professor Prest has written a substantial, fair-minded and elegant biography of a most distinguished man. It deserves a wide readership.' - Dr R O'Regan, Supreme Court of Queensland Library History Program Yearbook, 2008
"This fine biography of Sir William Blackstone displays both Wilfrid Prest’s command of English legal history and his ability to tell the dancer from the dance. For more than two centuries now…Blackstone the jurisprudent has been obscured by Blackstone the law-book. Behind the lucidity and balance of Blackstone’s Commentaries, Prest reveals the pompous, energetic man who penned them: an orphan, a scholar, a forceful academic politician, a shrewd estate manager, and, finally, when his ship came in, a thoughtful and progressive judge. Prest has also overcome the temptation to dwell on his subject’s times rather than his life. To our continuing discussion of Blackstone, this book restores the human element…The William Blackstone who appears in these pages is a man to be taken on his own forceful terms." - Allen D. Boyer, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol 22, 2010
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