Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman one of the few I should like to recall from the dead. It is a very good exercise for an historian to stray into biography - a field seemingly so similar and yet fundamentally different. Perhaps no historian can really handle individual psychology or make an individual the centre of his book. All the same I think my "Bismarck" is the best on him ever written". Taylor's Bismarck is not the Junker and iron Chancellor but a complicated, urban intellectual, "the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthen father". Instead of
The Elder Statesman The Elder Statesman The Elder Statesman is a play in verse by T. S. Eliot first performed in 1958 and published in 1959. When the play opens, the setting is that of Lord Claverton's drawing room. Lord Claverton is a man of distinction, who is well known and well respected in society, where he exerts considerable influence. In the play's first production at The 1958 Edinburgh Festival this character bore a strong visual resemblance to the then Premier, Harold Macmillan. As the play opens, we see Claverton's daughter Monica, bantering with her beau, Charles Hemington. From their conversation, it becomes