Macaulay, the Shaping of the Historian

by John Clive

Book Overview

Macaulay, The Shaping Of The Historian This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394472780
• ISBN13: 9780394472782
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 499 Pages
• Weight: 2.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A masterful biography, but unfortunately not completed.

John Clive's biography "Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian" is one of the finest biographies of the last 30 years. Although Macaulay is not widely read today, he was a major essayist and influential historian -- Winston Churchill's prose style seems to have been greatly influenced by Macaulay. Clive's book takes Macaulay from his days as infant prodigy, learning foreign languages as a child and writing histories before he was a teenager, and ends as he is beginning to write his enormously popular "History of England." Macaulay was also an important figure in the passage of the First Reform Bill, which was the first major alteration in the British Constitution in hundreds of years, and set the country on the road to a truly democratice form of government. Clive provides a superb description of pre-Victorian England and of Macaulay, one of those amazing people of the 19th Century whose capacity for work seems to have been endless. I don't know if Clive ever intended to write a second volume that would have covered the rest of Macaulay's life, but in any event he died before doing so. However, we should be grateful for what we have here. For me, the book was so interesting that I purchased a copy of Macaulay's Collected Works from a used bookstore, and thoroughly enjoyed them. Clive's biography is a model of the genre; while well-researched, he does not overwhelm the reader with useless facts simply because he knows them, but rather concentrates on the key facts to bring Macaulay to life. You do not have to have read Macaulay to enjoy this book.

THIS is the perfect book

I have never seen a book better done than is this magnificent work. It tells of the earlyier life of Macaulay, from his birth on Oct 25, 1800 till the time he returned from India on June 1, 1838. How I wish there were a volume II! This book won my award for best book read in 1975, and after I read it I knew that it was a shoo-in winner for that award, even though I read in July of that year.