Charles Wheeler
The American Engima
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
By Conrad Black
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1280pp £30 order from our bookshop
That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt
By Robert H Jackson
Oxford University Press 290pp £20 order from our bookshop
IN A PREFACE to this monumental biography Conrad Black pays tribute to his publisher’s editor, William Whitworth. Their dealings, he tells us, were often abrasive, and conducted entirely by e-mail. He hopes that their intense relationship will eventually lead to an actual meeting. Intriguing. I wonder whether a hard-pressed Whitworth might have suggested cuts. If so, he was overruled. Black’s opus is defiantly, self-indulgently long, and for the most part a painstaking recital of facts, culled from the record of a period the author is not old enough to remember.
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