"Kynaston's aim is to provide a history of the Bank for the general reader and in this he triumphantly succeeds . Wonderfully readable " -- Financial Times "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has been waiting for a biographer who could do justice to the richness of her story . This is the work of a scholar with a gift for illuminating every square inch of each enormous canvas he chooses to paint . Kynaston brings characters large and small to life " -- Literary Review " A triumph . this portrait of the Bank of England really is fascinating, at times even gripping " -- Sunday Telegraph "This mammoth history of the Bank of England is full of human detail . What the reader gets is an exemplary narrative history, with the archives plundered judiciously and plenty of focus on people and their quirks . Kynaston has produced a fascinating accompaniment to his four-volume history of the City. His portrait of a globally influential institution is rendered on an entertainingly human scale " -- The Times "Kynaston is a masterly storyteller and has made the material as accessible as it could possibly be to the non-specialist .

It is through allowing actors, great and small, to have their say, that Kynaston conveys the complex culture of the Bank" -- Prospect "Kynaston's access to the bank's archives - this is the official history, commissioned by the then governor Mervyn King in 2009 - yields tremendous detail . This archive-led approach . yield[s] details no other historian of the bank has hitherto discovered " -- Sunday Times "As David Kynaston makes clear in an engaging and absorbing account of its history, the Bank is an enigmatically hybrid creature, like a centaur or sphinx - a hybrid that has undergone significant mutations over three centuries of adaptation and evolution . Although the arc of Kynaston's narrative is one of rising prosperity in the long term, this is a story punctuated by popping bubbles, major swindles, banking bailouts, sterling devaluations and squeezes on liquidity , which become themselves the matter of his drama" -- Guardian "It is a part of Kynaston's huge achievement that such moments of insight and pleasure should accompany what has become a monumental history of our recent past" -- The Times "David Kynaston is one of the great chroniclers of our modern story . Every paragraph contains some glittering nugget" -- Sunday Times "A historian of peerless sensitivity and curiosity about the lives of individuals. His method is to immerse first himself, then his readers, in a deep quotidian fabric of the time, making every strand visible before gradually lifting his gaze and revealing the wider pattern" -- Financial Times "Kynaston's project is already being acclaimed as one of the great achievements of modern history" -- Daily Telegraph "Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face" -- Hilary Mantel, Observer "Magnificent" -- Observer.