A Victorian Life

Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography By Saul K. Padover McGraw-Hill, 667 pp., $18.95 This is the 12,379th biography of Karl Marx. I have no reference handy, so I made the figure up; but I’m sure it’s on the low side. Professor Padover’s bibliography notes that 456 books and articles about Marx were published in 1968 alone (he graciously forbears to list them).

Yet in all this welter, there is relatively little about the man. Marx is praised as a prophet, damned as a de-

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography By Saul K. Padover McGraw-Hill, 667 pp., $18.95 This is the 12,379th biography of Karl Marx. I have no reference handy, so I made the figure up; but I’m sure it’s on the low side. Professor Padover’s bibliography notes that 456 books and articles about Marx were published in 1968 alone (he graciously forbears to list them).

Yet in all this welter, there is relatively little about the man. Marx is praised as a prophet, damned as a de-