Macaulay

A magisterial biography of a man now nearly forgotten and always clearly misunderstood… Elegant, erudite, and enlightening.
-- David M. Shribman Boston Globe

[A] virtuosically argued and detailed account.
-- Brian Morton Sunday Herald

It is a testament to Sullivan’s complex and sophisticated approach that I ended up both detesting and admiring Macaulay more… This is a fascinating, provocative study. In our era, of citizenship tests and pre-emptive strikes, when what makes, binds or breaks a nation is a pressing concern, Macaulay’s legacy is more instructive than ever to re-examine.
-- Stuart Kelly Scotland on Sunday

[Sullivan’s] biography is well paced and richly detailed… His book is an absorbing tour through the world of an elite Victorian liberal.
-- Jeffrey Collins New Criterion

Superbly researched… [An] impressive and subtle book.
-- Raymond Carr Spectator

[An] exceptional book about the great 19th-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay… Sullivan’s portrait of the historian-statesman is unimpeachable, based on a deep reading of Macaulay’s voluminous correspondence, journals, speeches, essays, and books. The man who emerges from this detailed portrait is loathsome but also sad. That he was popular in his own age says worlds about emerging values in mid-19th-century England… Enthusiastically recommended; this exceptionally well-written work will please all serious lovers of history.
-- David Keymer Library Journal

In this long-awaited study, Robert Sullivan clearly and persuasively explores Thomas Babington Macaulay’s personal life and intellectual development in tandem, a difficult and rare achievement. He presents a probing, convincing, and ultimately devastating portrait of the mind of a liberal imperialist that transforms our understanding of Macaulay. Victorian intellectual history has no similar study. Macaulay is a major accomplishment that makes Sullivan one of the premier Victorianists of his generation.
-- Frank M. Turner, Yale University

In this boldly original but elegantly executed book, Sullivan coolly subverts many of the central preconceptions through which we have conventionally interpreted Macaulay. By focusing on several aspects of Macaulay’s intellect hitherto discounted or entirely neglected—the formative and intensely personal nature of his classicism, his carefully camouflaged scepticism, his profound psychological disturbances, and not least his consistently ruthless attitudes toward Ireland—Sullivan has produced a more complex—and darker—portrait of the great Victorian than has ever before been conceived.
-- Ciaran Brady, Trinity College Dublin