John Patrick William Ehrman FBA (17 March 1920 – 15 June 2011) was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

  historian, most notable for his three-volume biography of William Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger was a British politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He became the youngest Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24 . He left office in 1801, but was Prime Minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806...

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Boyd Hilton

Boyd Hilton

Boyd Hilton is a British historian and a professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He specialises in modern British history, from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.Hilton was elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1974...

 has claimed that "Pitt dominated the politics of his time and John Ehrman's three-volumes...dominate the historiography. It is hardly a biography, and indeed it is not clear that Pitt had an inner life to biographize, but it is a consummate account of the political ‘life and times’. The author's determination to deal with every episode in detail sometimes blurs the perspective, but readers can be assured that each topic has been thoroughly researched and that Ehrman's analysis is invariably judicious".

Ehrman married a daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake

Geoffrey Blake (Royal Navy officer)

Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake, KCB, DSO was an officer in the Royal Navy who went on to be Fourth Sea Lord.-Naval career:...

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Works

• The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–1697 (Cambridge University Press, 1953).
• Cabinet Government and War, 1890–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1958).
• The British Government and Commercial Negotiations with Europe 1783–1793 (Cambridge University Press, 1962).
• The Younger Pitt
  • The Years of Acclaim (Constable, 1969).
  • The Reluctant Transition (Constable, 1983).
  • The Consuming Struggle (Constable, 1996).

External references

• Obituary of John Ehrman, The Daily Telegraph, 17 June, 2011