The race of the thoroughbreds

I read every page, every line of this very long book with sustained interest and pleasure. It is a collective biography of four Grenadier Guards officers — Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank — who, after becoming friends at Eton, and serving together gallantly and bloodily in the trenches of the first world war, went on to play prominent roles on the stage of British politics for the rest of the century, usually as allies in the Conservative party cause but sometimes as rivals or even, towards the end, as enemies.

But as well as being a collective biography it is also a comparative biography, since the four subjects — although they all started at Eton in the same year, 1906 —came from different social backgrounds, Salisbury and Lyttelton from the hereditary aristocracy and Macmillan and Crookshank from the professional middle class. In today’s England it may appear that they were all grandees, but that is not how they saw themselves at the time. Indeed part of the fascination of the book is to note how even the formidably close regimental bonds forged in battle were not strong enough to prevent subtle class distinctions driving them apart, at least initially. While the hereditary aristocrats, Salisbury and Lyttelton, gained immediate preferment in the Conservative party, Macmillan and Crookshank, as they were quick to notice, had a far harder struggle. Even so, the shared memory of the trenches was never entirely extinguished and one of the many achievements of this book is the way the author delicately plays on this note without ever pressing too hard upon the pedal.