From Publishers Weekly
Although known for his unflappability, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was actually highly strung from childhood. He was a solitary adolescent, molded by his forbidding American mother from Indiana and his publisher father, descendant of Scottish crofters. As Horne's magisterial, engrossing biography reveals, Macmillan suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1931; it took years for this emotional romantic to remake himself into a stern pragmatist. This first volume of an authorized yet highly candid portrait by the author of A Savage War of Peace climaxes with details of Macmillan's role in the 1956 Suez Canal crisis in which he secretly advanced a plan to involve Israel in a joint attack on Egypt. Crammed with revelations, Horne's robust profile divulges that Macmillan's wife Dorothy had a romantic affair that nearly wrecked their marriage and lasted until her death. Horne portrays Macmillan as Churchill's right-hand man during the darkest days of WW II, hopping from meetings with Ike and de Gaulle to Finland and Casablanca. He rebuts charges that Macmillan conspired to repatriate and thus send to their doom tens of thousands of Cossacks, White Russians and Yugoslavs after the war. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
British Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, Macmillan was a member of the Macmillan publishing family and had an American mother. The first volume of this absorbing authorized biography benefits from personal interviews and from access to diaries and other private papers. Some new light is shed on political events, but far more, sadly, on his deeply troubled family life. Macmillan was a highly private man who in the end eludes even this privileged biographer; one feels that Horne (also the author of Harold Macmillan: A Life in Pictures, St. Martin's, 1984) has no idea why Macmillan acted as he did in the Suez crisis, for example. But this is essential for modern British history collections.
- Nancy C. Cridland, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Nancy C. Cridland, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
