BIOGRAPHY

Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist Niall Ferguson; Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita Robert Roper; Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG Richard Tomlinson; Frost: That Was the Life That Was: The Authorised Biography Neil Hegarty; Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond: A Writer’s Memoir Frederic Raphael; Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science Richard Dawkins; Island of Dreams: A Personal History of a Remarkable Place Dan Boothby; Reckless Chrissie Hynde; Every Time a Friend Succeeds, Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal Jay Parini

1923–1968: The Idealist

Niall Ferguson (Allen Lane, 1,008pp, £35, Oldie price £30)

IS HENRY KISSINGER, US Secretary of State under presidents Nixon and Ford, an amoral Machiavellian realist, as his critics have traditionally argued, or is he a frustrated and misunderstood idealist, as the Harvard-based British historian Ferguson claims in this, the first volume of the official biography?

The conventional image of Kissinger has been dominated by charges in earlier books by William Shawcross and Christopher Hitchens that he is a war criminal. One critical Kissinger biographer, Greg Grandin, reviewing the book for the Guardian, highlighted Ferguson’s defensiveness. ‘He wants to rescue Kissinger from history’s dock… the tone is litigious, setting the biographer up as barrister.’ Grandin felt that ‘it has been Kissinger’s sharpest critics who have most appreciated his acute sense of self, who have treated him, however disapprovingly, as a fully dimensional individual with a churning, complex psyche. In contrast, Ferguson, tone-deaf to Kissinger’s darker notes, condemns him to a literary fate worse than anything that Hitchens could have meted out: Kissinger, in this book, is boring.’

Andrew Roberts, another British historian based in America, reviewed the book for the New York Times. ‘Ferguson’s investigation of Kissinger’s intellectual roots shows Kissinger was indeed an idealist in the Kantian sense, rather than in its modern American political version,’ he explained. ‘This is an admiring portrait rather than a particularly affectionate one. If Kissinger’s official biographer cannot be accused of falling for his subject’s justifiably famed charm, he certainly gives the reader enough evidence to conclude that Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest Americans in the history of the Republic,’ and if the next volume ‘is anywhere near as comprehensive, well written and riveting as the first, this will be his masterpiece’. Saul David, too, in the

Evening Standard, found no evidence of flattery. ‘The finely nuanced portrait of Kissinger that emerges from this exhaustively detailed book is unlikely to be bettered,’ he concluded.