Books, Arts & Manners

Harold Macmillan: Volume I: 1894-1956, by Alistair Horne (Viking, 537 pp., $24.95)

To judge by outward appearances, Harold Macmillan was a Tory grandee direct from central casting. His patrician looks, his languid Edwardian manners, his cynical wit, and his famous “unflappability”—he calmly read Aeschylus while wounded and under fire in no man’s land in the 1914-18 war and, forty years later, dismissed the resignation of his entire Treasury team as “a little local difficulty”—all combined to make him seem a figure of supreme self-confidence and of no great relevance to the postwar world of the welfare state. The American public got a glimpse of this polished performer when, responding to Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN, he delivered the adroit parliamentary putdown: “May I have a translation of that?” It was the Perfect Squelch.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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Harold Macmillan: Volume I: 1894-1956, by Alistair Horne (Viking, 537 pp., $24.95)

To judge by outward appearances, Harold Macmillan was a Tory grandee direct from central casting. His patrician looks, his languid Edwardian manners, his cynical wit, and his famous “unflappability”—he calmly read Aeschylus while wounded and under fire in no man’s land in the 1914-18 war and, forty years later, dismissed the resignation of his entire Treasury team as “a little local difficulty”—all combined to make him seem a figure of supreme self-confidence and of no great relevance to the postwar world of the welfare state. The American public got a glimpse of this polished performer when, responding to Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN, he delivered the adroit parliamentary putdown: “May I have a translation of that?” It was the Perfect Squelch.