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.
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R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
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