George Malcolm Young (29 April 1882 – 18 November 1959) was an English historian, best known for his book on Victorian times in Britain, Portrait of an Age (1936). After a brief stint as an academic and a more than 20-year career as a civil servant, Young began to pursue a literary career in the mid-1920s. His books include studies of Edward Gibbon (1932), Charles I and Oliver Cromwell (1935) and Stanley Baldwin (1952) and the published texts of his lectures on literary and political topics. Life and career Early years Young was born at Charlton, Kent, on 29 April 1882, the only son of the four children of George Frederick Young, waterman, later a steamer master, and his wife, Rosetta Jane Elizabeth, née Ross. He was educated at St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1905 he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and became a tutor at St John's College (1906–1908). In 1908 Young joined the Board of Education, headed by Sir Robert Morant, under whose reorganisation he worked in the universities department. When the board's Standing Advisory Committee for University Grants was established in 1911, Young was its first secretary, and from 1917 was joint permanent secretary of the short-lived Ministry of Reconstruction, alongside Vaughan Nash. In that capacity he accompanied Arthur Henderson, then a member of the war cabinet, on a visit to Russia in 1917, where Young met Francis Lindley, counsellor in the British embassy. He went with Lindley to Archangel and later accompanied him to Vienna when Lindley was posted there as high commissioner. In Vienna, Young was for a time a director of the new Anglo-Austrian Bank. Writer The failure of the Ministry of Reconstruction to bring about substantial domestic reforms left Young disillusioned. He resigned from the public service in the early 1920s and devoted himself to literature. In a 1983 study, James A. Colaiaco writes that Young became prominent in London intellectual society and participated in "lively discussions at the Athenaeum" while "his judgment continued to mature and his literary skills were perfected". In the late 1920s Young corresponded on a literary topic with the author Mona Wilson, who before her retirement from the civil service had been a colleague at the Ministry of Reconstruction. She asked him down for the weekend to her house at Oare, near Marlborough, Wiltshire. As his publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, put it