Sir John Plumb
Cód:
491_9781911454830
Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb (1911 – 2001) was a great British historian. He led an extraordinary life of startling contrasts, much of it cloaked in secrecy. This memoir attempts to lift that cloak This is a very personal account written by Neil McKendrick, a fellow historian, a fellow Master of a Cambridge college and one his oldest and closest friends, who knew Plumb from his early days to his dying hours some fifty years after they first met. This new memoir depicts a startlingly revelatory portrait of a complex and controversial man who moved from poverty to great affluence; from beginning his life in a two-up two-down terrace house in Leicester to end it in what was called “Jack's Palace” surrounded by a world-class collection of Vincennes and Sèvres. Plumb’s personality was sufficiently beguiling to attract the attention of four significant novelists who left six vivid if unflattering fictional versions of him – depicting him as a ruthless charmer, a serial bisexual philanderer and, most bizarrely of all, as a murderer planning a further murder. In truth the real man needed no fictional elaboration to make him unusually interesting. In fact his life is often astonishing. The historian, who achieved such international eminence that, on the direct order of the US President and after a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Congress on his 80th birthday to do honour to the historian who had taught the American people so much, was no run of the mill academic. In addition to his academic work, during the Second World War Plumb worked in the code-breaking department of the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park, Hut 8 & Hut 4; later Block B. He headed a section working on a German Naval hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren. He became Professor of Modern English History at Cambridge in 1966, serving as Master of Christ's College from 1978-82, when he was knighted in 1982. His pupils included Simo
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