Blair Worden
J.R. Maddicott’s The Origins of the English Parliament 924–1327 (OUP, £30) is not one for the bedside, but its wide and profound scholarship has much to teach us about the roots and functions of an institution now subjected to so much unhistorical criticism.
Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Allen Lane, £25) is an absorbing and elegant account of Smith’s mind and of the Scottish context, social and intellectual, that produced it. D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (Chatto, £25) gives a wonderful sense of Macmillan’s complexity and stature and of the place of personality in the fortunes of power and the making of policy.
Marcus Berkmann
Every compulsive reader is on a quest of some sort, and mine, I have realised, is in search of the perfect comic novel. God knows why: I have 80-odd P. G. Wodehouses on my shelves, and a good quarter of those must be as near perfection as makes no difference.
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