Ten years of work have gone into the writing of John Ehrman's powerful biography of the younger William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury in England during the supremely important period of political transition, parliamentary reform, and war against France that marked the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth. With incisive scholarship, this authoritative life recounts the story of how a great Prime Minister rescued his country from the brink of bankruptcy and helped set it on the path to a century of greatness.