Bad Timing 
R.W. Johnson
- Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon 1897-1977 by D.R. Thorpe
- The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950-57 edited by Peter Catterall
Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by Anthony Nutting: ‘he had for too long been the Golden Boy of the Tory Party, the glamorous Crown Prince awaiting the summons to mount the throne in place of the ageing Emperor.’ Indeed, a survey of historians shows that Eden’s short premiership was enough to earn him the title of ‘worst prime minister of the 20th century’. One of the merits of D.R. Thorpe’s new biography is that it enables one to sympathise with Eden’s own verdict (after Horace Walpole): ‘Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’ Eden was a man only too able to feel, trying hard to be someone who only thinks.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.
Other articles by this contributor:
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
print layout
tell a friend