Historical and Critical Essays

"Yes, the greatest historical essayist in the English language, in my view. This Everyman edition is two volumes of his essays from The Edinburgh Review , which, as you know, was The New York Review of Books of its time, or maybe I should turn that the other way round. It had long critical review essays of the kind people are still writing. Although Macaulay was a teeny bit dismissive of his own work in the genre they are actually models of their kind, full of wonderful insight. The essay on Frederick the Great in volume two will just have you rolling in the aisles. Well, you know that Frederick the Great as a young man had this dalliance with Voltaire, and Frederick the Great showed Voltaire his poems, at which Voltaire famously said: ‘See what a quantity of his dirty laundry the King has sent me to wash.’ Voltaire offered advice on the conduct of diplomacy of which Frederick the Great was equally contemptuous. The essays are just full of wonderful detail of that kind. A lot of them are actually biographical. One of the other things I love about it is that quite a lot of my work is on the frontier between literature and politics, and Macaulay is absolutely there. He writes a wonderful essay on Milton. Well, Milton is Milton. He was deeply engaged in politics, but on the other hand you have Pitt, who was a writing and magnificently speaking politician; John Bunyan, a highly political writer – he’s got Machiavelli in there. It’s often what we might now call public intellectuals. But if you did a search you probably wouldn’t find Macaulay being mentioned more than once a month these days, but he’s an absolute master of the genre and I think many people are still in his debt without quite knowing it."