Martin Luther King Jr is today so venerated in America that even conservatives claim him as a fellow traveller. He was a meritocrat, they argue, not a socialist. Were he alive, he would disavow reparations and denounce violent protest.

Wary of such claims, Jonathan Eig seeks to set the record straight by expanding it, giving us a ‘warts and all’ biography of a man who was complex and flawed – he ‘chewed his fingernails’, ‘hid his cigarettes from his children’ and cheated on his wife ‘continually’.

Born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a preacher, King was shaped in his youth by white racism and the black church. As a student of theology, he wondered if, as he inferred from Nietzsche, Christianity was simply too gentle to stand up to a stubborn evil like segregation. He dated a white girl in college but felt compelled to end the relationship. Society would never accept an interracial marriage. Desperate for love, he dialled the number he’d been given of a girl called Coretta Scott, who was black and single, and declared, ‘I am like Napoleon; I’m at my Waterloo and I’m on my knees.’

‘He was a typical man,’ Coretta later recalled. ‘Smoothness. Jive.’ They married in 1953 and would eventually have four children. Coretta was expected to stay at home and play mother. King played the field. Later, when he was famous and worth a wiretap, the FBI obsessively documented his