A solid debut by lawyer-turned-historian, Mike Rendell. The author has taken the copious diaries, lists and other Ephemera of his ancestor and ordered them into an entertaining narrative which gives you a firm understanding of everyday life of a middle-class businessman on the up during the mid-Georgian period. Rendell succeeds wonderfully at teasing out the personality of his subject, Richard Hall, a God-fearing fellow much exercised by the weather, his own health and dozens of other topics, many trivial, some of great moment. One gets a clear sense of the cost of living, long distance coach travel, decorating one's home, quack medicine, servants and schooling, the precariousness of family life, and so on: social history at its best. The book is richly illustrated and has excellent appendices." - By Mike Paterson, of London Historian