Business life and public policy: essays in honour of D.C. Coleman.

Business Life and Public Policy: Essays in Honour of D. C. Coleman. Edited by Neil McKendrick and R. B. Outhwaite. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xiv + 263 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $44.50.

These essays, which range from the politics of the fishing industry in the 1550s to the nationalization of coalmining in the 1940s, are not only a fitting tribute to the protean character of Donald Coleman both as man and as scholar, but they also rank with those collected in 1981 for Lord Dacre as the most vivacious, elegant, and catholic of the genre to be published in Britain in the last decade. As one of many tyros indebted to Coleman for intellectual inspiration, material sponsorship, good whiskey and better jokes, I can confirm that the preface marvelously evokes his personality and …