The latest addition to this distinguished series surveys the career of Harold Macmillan, from his days as an isolated and eccentric backbencher before the Second World War to his premiership of 1957-63. It explores his political ideas and political ambitions; his rise to supreme power; and the uses he made of it, in what was a key phase in Britain's search for, and adaptation to, a post-imperial role in the modern world.

From an unprepossessing start, Macmillan first achieved influence under Churchill during the war, which he ended as Minister Resident - almost a Viceroy - in the Mediterranean theatre. He came to public prominence as a flamboyant and successful Minister of Housing in the early 1950s. He was then Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Eden.

When the latter collapsed under the strain of the Suez debacle of 1956, Macmillan was well placed to snatch the premiership for himself, elbowing his lifelong rival, R. A. Butler, aside in pursuit of the supreme prize.

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Macmillan's premiership was in many ways an unlucky period, both at home and abroad. He presided over the dissolution of the British Empire, and the first stages of what has proved an irreversible economic decline; his 'stop-go' economic policies were notoriously unsuccessful; Britain's first attempt to join the European Common Market was rebuffed; and even the Special Relationship with Kennedy and the United States exposed, rather than disguised, Britain's steady extinction as a Great Power.

Yet most of this was inevitable. Macmillan's ultimate reputation will depend on how posterity judges his understanding of these changes in the role and status of postwar Britain, and his skill in adapting himself and his country to meet them.

John Turner's short and incisive study is an impressive step towards that mature assessment. Using previously unpublished material, he shows that Macmillan was more successful and farsighted than his recent reputation has allowed, but also that his 'unflappable' image was the conscious creation of a devious and highly strung political operator, who used his power ruthlessly to reinforce his party's - and his own - dominant position in British politics.

The figure who emerges from these pages is not in many respects an attractive one; but it is both more formidable and - in its indecisions and stresses - more human and more revealing than the languid aristocratic persona so sedulously promoted by Macmillan in his elder statesman years. This is a book that will be necessary reading for anyone interested in the history and politics of postwar Britain, and its changing role on the international stage.