Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography by Corrado Vivanti Princeton […]

Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet by Jesse Norman HarperCollins, 2013, […]

 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. 

Hobbes and the Law of Nature, by Perez Zagorin; Princeton University Press, 2009, 177 pages, US$29.95.

Thomas Hobbes is known today as the political philosopher who wrote Leviathan. Although quoted frequently—“the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—Leviathan is nevertheless a classic work comparable to, say, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—often cited but seldom read. This is a pity. Hobbes discussed the foundations of sovereign authority and political obligation in a way that still has much relevance.

Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, by Tristram Hunt; Metropolitan Books, 2009, US$35.

Karl Marx once famously said that while philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Since Marx and his intellectual collaborator, Friedrich Engels, did exactly that, judgments of both have ranged from ardent devotion at one extreme to vigorous deprecation at the other. Tristram Hunt occupies the narrow middle ground. Born in 1974, he is an ideal biographer because, despite his links to the Labour Party, he comes to Engels without the partisan feelings of earlier generations. Two decades after the Berlin Wall was demolished, it is perhaps possible to take a more objective approach to Engels and his thought. In Marx’s General (published in the UK as The Frock-Coated Communist), Hunt attempts just this.

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, by John Carey; Faber & Faber, 2009, $49.99.

John Carey’s William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies discusses the novelist and his work. The subtitle, Carey admits, is ironic. Golding was much more than the author of his first published (and most celebrated) novel. As a biographer, Carey has been blessed. He has secured access to and presented to the public such a mass of material that his biography will be a valuable resource for any future attempts to discuss Golding’s life and works.

First, Golding’s father, a bookish, atheist and socialist school teacher, kept a journal, which Carey uses to provide insights into the man who had the most significant influence on Golding the writer.