Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words

Well, it’s quite the title, isn’t it? It tends to invite comparisons. The first one that occurred to me, though, was that the original Promised Land guy managed to get all the important stuff down on two stone tablets. His would-be successor doesn’t have quite that gift for compression. As he semi-apologises in the opening pages (he feels bad about it, but not bad enough to do a ruthless edit), this memoir was originally envisioned as a 500-pager. A Promised Land is just north of 700 pages, and there’s another volume to come.

That speaks of a certain self-regard. Then again, Barack Obama has a good bit to be self-regarding about. He overcame a modest background, a Muslim-sounding middle name and the melanin thing to win the presidency, in large part thanks to an unsurpassed gift for oratory. He helped avert a global depression after the 2008 crash. He passed the Affordable Care Act in the teeth of a ferociously obstructionist GOP.