Volume 36, Number 18 · November 23, 1989
An Unlikely Demon
By Hugo Young
Harold Macmillan: Volume II, 1957–1986
by Alistair Horne
Viking, 739 pp., $24.95
Harold Macmillan's period as prime minister, which stretched from 1957 to 1963, divides the Churchillian from the Thatcherite world. Macmillan was the last representative of the prewar generation—he had served in World War I, entered Parliament in the 1920s, and lived through the time when Britain could still claim major international influence—to control the Conservative party and run the country. Equally, he was the prime begetter of what followed. Much of the future was a reaction against him. The two most significant prime ministers of the next quarter-century, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, saw their mission, with some exactitude, as being to efface if not destroy the values Macmillan stood for and the world he was thought to have preserved. He survived, as it happens, for almost that entire period, an elder revered for his stylish jokes and rehabilitated as a repository of undoctrinaire wisdom that could be used against the Thatcherite ideologists. But it was as a totemic demon that he had his main influence on modern times.
Review, 3426 words
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