Camelot’s chronicler

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....