Dr Tristram Hunt is Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and one of Britain's best-known historians. He served as MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017 (when he led the campaign to save the Wedgwood Museum) and as Shadow Secretary of State for Education between October 2013 and September 2015. He was a senior lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London, and has written numerous series for radio and television. His previous books include The English Civil War At First Hand, The Frock-Coated Communist- The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, Ten Cities that Made an Empire and Building Jerusalem- The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, between them published in more than a dozen languages.
This is a remarkable and impassioned book. Josiah Wedgwood
innovated across boundaries of technology and art and taste,
commerce and scientific enquiry, and Tristram Hunt makes the
powerful case for rediscovering his humane entrepreneurial spirit.
The Radical Potter brings Wedgwood's protean energy alive
for a new generation and I loved it. -- Edmund de Waal
impassioned, wide-ranging ... Hunt's sympathetic, engaged and
finely written biography makes it clear that [Wedgwood] was a
one-off, and a genius. -- David Horspool * Spectator *
fabulously unputdownable ... In parts it reads like a thriller. --
Judith Woods * Telegraph *
Wedgwood's remarkable story has been told in many biographies over
the years. The great contribution of The Radical Potter,
Tristram Hunt's new book, is to place him in the context of the
rapid economic and social changes during his lifetime that helped
make his success possible. -- Richard Lambert * Financial Times
*
this brisk and highly readable biography ... places Wedgwood in a
dissenting tradition that goes back to the civil wars ... It is a
timely tale. -- Paul Lay * The Times *
engrossing ... Hunt, as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
and MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017, is uniquely
fitted to write this book. -- John Carey * Sunday Times *
superb ... this delicious, meticulously researched, wide-ranging but never long-winded book made me admire Tristram Hunt as well as Josiah Wedgwood.
-- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * Daily Mail *One of the achievements of Tristram Hunt's biography... is too bring into view the commercial and moral instincts of the man behind the powerhouse ... Wedgwood emerges from this books as a man of voracious interest in the world. Canny and determined, he had both strong beliefs and the adaptability that marks any great innovator. Hunt ... is as interested in what the man can tell us about the times as the times meant for the man.
-- Sarah Watling * Literary Review *this attractively packaged ... splendid... biography of ceramics impresario Josiah Wedgwood ... reminds us not only of what has been lost in terms of manufacturing, but what can be regained.
-- Jacqueline Riding * Country Life *Hunt performs the important task of telling the great potter's story clearly and accessibly ... Wedgwood the man should be as famous as Wedgwood the brand. That he is not might be due to his business - there are more heroic and glamorous trades than making pots - and to the national tendency to undervalue manufacturing. Hunt's book should help to correct that imbalance.
-- Rowan Moore * The Observer *Josiah Wedgwood was "the Steve Jobs" of the 18th century, according to Tristram Hunt, the historian and V&A director. Wedgwood, of modest background but expansive inventive genius, turned a Staffordshire pottery firm into a global company, one that showed that Britain could make high-quality porcelain, a high-demand product in the new age of tea drinking. Not bad for a man who couldn't turn a wheel because childhood disease disabled one of his legs. He was nicknamed "Owd Wooden Leg" by his workers - and referred to the day he lost his limb as "Saint Amputation Day".
-- Robbie Millen * The Times Books of the Year * |
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