Kynaston's aim is to provide a history of the Bank for the general reader and in this he triumphantly succeeds, providing a worthy complement to the notable series of books on different periods of the Bank's history … wonderfully readable

John Plender, 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 … I, for one, will hope for a second edition in a decade or so's time

Martin Vander Weyer, Literary Review

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

Iain Martin, The Times

A triumph … this portrait of the Bank of England really is fascinating, at times even gripping

Simon Heffer, Sunday Telegraph

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

Robert Skidelsky, 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

Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times