Volume LIV Number 7-8
Quadrant magazine is the leading general intellectual journal of ideas, literature, poetry and historical and political debate published in Australia.
You can subscribe to the print edition of Quadrant or Quadrant Online, or both versions. See our subscription page for more information.
Books
Traducing Macaulay
Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power, by Robert E. Sullivan; Harvard University Press, 2010, 624 pages, US$39.95.
Of those works published on Thomas Babington (later Lord) Macaulay (1800–1859), the most notable is the superb 1973 biography by John Leonard Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, which describes the first half of the life of a highly talented and successful man of letters. In purchasing and then reading this latest biography of Macaulay, written, as it happens, by one of Clive’s students, I was expecting, even hoping, to find a warm, fond account of the Macaulay of the Essays and The History of England, the eminent literary figure of his day and popular historian who cast such a long shadow over his era. Instead, Sullivan’s Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a quite different book.
Subscribe to Quadrant to access archived content
The full text of this archived article is only available to subscribers to Quadrant Premium.
To gain access, subscribers need to first login at the top of the Home page. To become a subscriber click here.