Richard Aldous’s book Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian is a case of one biographer telling the story of another. Richard Aldous, an Englishman and professor of history at Bard College, has written numerous biographies of political and musical figures as well as Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War in 2005 and Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship in 2012. He brings a strong grasp of American foreign policy to his workmanlike study of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., though, to be fair, few writers can match Schlesinger’s capacity for witty, lucid characterizations of dense historical material.

Aldous would seem to be an apt choice to write about Arthur Schlesinger, a key architect of American liberalism and the most influential American historian of the last half of the twentieth century. Schlesinger was the author of prize-winning biographies of Andrew Jackson, fdr, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. All but Jackson were men of inherited wealth who were given a worshipful treatment by Schlesinger, who preferred candidates for high office who came out of the Social Register, such as W. Averell Harriman and Adlai Stevenson.

Schlesinger, the son of the Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. (who played a key role in guiding his son’s career), saw himself as a natural aristocrat. Aldous’s discussion of the young Arthur’s travails during World War II is well done. While Arthur’s younger brother was at the front, Arthur was in London writing for the owi(Office of War Information). But he was driven