Glyndwr Williams

Glyndwr Williams was Professor of History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He specialised in British history and the history of exploration, authoring a number of significant studies in those fields, including The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century (1962), The Great South Sea: English voyages and encounters, 1570-1750 (1997), and The Death of Captain Cook: A hero made and unmade (2009).

Glyndwr Williams reviews 'Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful knowledge and polite culture' by John Gascoigne

September 1994, no. 164 • 01 September 1994

In recent years, scholars have attempted to come to grips with the prodigious range of Sir Joseph Banks’s activities during a public career that lasted more than fifty years. Wherever one turned in the establishment circles of George III’s England there stood, it seemed, the massive figure of Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society, Privy Councillor, adviser to government, patron of the s ... (read more)