Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman one of the few I should like to recall from the dead. It is a very good exercise for an historian to stray into biography - a field seemingly so similar and yet fundamentally different. Perhaps no historian can really handle individual psychology or make an individual the centre of his book. All the same I think my "Bismarck" is the best on him ever written". Taylor's Bismarck is not the Junker and iron Chancellor but a complicated, urban intellectual, "the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthen father". Instead of
Chancellor of the Exchequer Prescott. It reverted to the chancellor in 2007, then Alistair Darling. The chancellor traditionally carries his Budget speech to the House of Commons in a particular red Despatch Box. The Chancellor's red briefcase is identical to the briefcases used by all other government ministers (known as ministerial boxes or "Despatch Boxes") to transport their official papers but is better known because the chancellor traditionally displays the briefcase, containing the Budget speech, to the press in the morning before delivering the speech. The original Budget briefcase was first used by William Ewart Gladstone in 1853 and continued in use until 1965