Reginald McKenna has never been the subject of scholarly attention. This was part due to his own preference for appearing at the periphery of events even when ostensibly at the centre, and the absence of a significant collection of private papers. The neglect of a statesmen and financier has now been redressed, in part through the natural advance of historical research, and in part due to the discovery of the missing archive. McKenna's role is now illuminated by his own reflections, and by the correspondence of friends and colleagues, including Asquith, Churchill, Keynes, Baldwin, Bonar Law, MacDonald and Chamberlain. McKenna's presence at the hub of political life in the first half of the century is now clear: in the radical Liberal governments of 1905-16, where he acted as a lightning conductor for the party; during the war; where he served as the Prime Minister's deputy and the principal voice for restraint in the conduct of the war; and as chairman of the world's largest bank, where until his death in office aged 80, he prompted progressive policies to deal with the issues of war debt, trade, mass unemployment and the return to gold. McKenna reliably declined offers from publishers in his lifetime. Unconcerned with posterity, one can only speculate as to his opinion if posthumous enquiry. He would probably have disagreed that the largest remaining gap in the twentieth-century British political biography has been filled.