Annal: 1974 National Book Award for Biography

Thomas Babington Macaulay was one of nineteenth-century England’s greatest figures. His History of England has been a classic for well over a century; his parliamentary speeches and his essays have inspired generations of statesmen; schoolchildren by the millions have memorized his Lays of Ancient Rome. In this masterly book, John Clive give us the forces—familial, intellectual, circumstatntial and psychological—that shaped the life and mind of this great historian and orator.