The many glowing reviews given this book over the years are well-deserved. John Clive gives his readers a deep and rich picture of Macaulay. I agree with another Amazon.com reviewer of this book that a volume II by Clive -- a volume that details Macaulay's life from his return from India to his death -- would have been a fantastic addition to the literature.

My only real reservation about Clive's biography is his attempted psychoanalysis of Macaulay. I find Freudian explanations to be wholly fanciful. They don't work, in my view -- and this fact seems especially true in the case of Macaulay. Fortunately, Clive doesn't resort to psychoanalysis too much.

Again, overall this is a truly excellent biography.

John Clive's biography "Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian" is one of the finest biographies of the last 30 years. Although Macaulay is not widely read today, he was a major essayist and influential historian -- Winston Churchill's prose style seems to have been greatly influenced by Macaulay. Clive's book takes Macaulay from his days as infant prodigy, learning foreign languages as a child and writing histories before he was a teenager, and ends as he is beginning to write his enormously popular "History of England." Macaulay was also an important figure in the passage of the First Reform Bill, which was the first major alteration in the British Constitution in hundreds of years, and set the country on the road to a truly democratice form of government. Clive provides a superb description of pre-Victorian England and of Macaulay, one of those amazing people of the 19th Century whose capacity for work seems to have been endless. I don't know if Clive ever intended to write a second volume that would have covered the rest of Macaulay's life, but in any event he died before doing so. However, we should be grateful for what we have here. For me, the book was so interesting that I purchased a copy of Macaulay's Collected Works from a used bookstore, and thoroughly enjoyed them. Clive's biography is a model of the genre; while well-researched, he does not overwhelm the reader with useless facts simply because he knows them, but rather concentrates on the key facts to bring Macaulay to life. You do not have to have read Macaulay to enjoy this book.

I have never seen a book better done than is this magnificent work. It tells of the earlyier life of Macaulay, from his birth on Oct 25, 1800 till the time he returned from India on June 1, 1838. How I wish there were a volume II! This book won my award for best book read in 1975, and after I read it I knew that it was a shoo-in winner for that award, even though I read in July of that year.

I bought this book and was excited about being able to take it right home and play along to the Beatles recordings on my guitar. I opened up to "I Saw Her Standing There" and put on my Please Please Me CD and to my surprise and dismay the book was in a different musical key than the CD, way off! I'm assuming they did that to make the songs easier to play on piano, but it wasn't what I wanted. Disappointed I took the book back and then ordered The Complete Beatles Scores from Amazon. I've been much happier with that book.