Harold MacMillan: 2volume 1: 1894-1956

Although known for his unflappability, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was actually highly strung from childhood. He was a solitary adolescent, molded by his forbidding American mother from Indiana and his publisher father, descendant of Scottish crofters. As Horne's magisterial, engrossing biography reveals, Macmillan suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1931; it took years for this emotional romantic to remake himself into a stern pragmatist. This first volume of an authorized yet highly candid portrait by the author of A Savage War of Peace climaxes with details of Macmillan's role in the 1956 Suez Canal crisis in which he secretly advanced a plan to involve Israel in a joint attack on Egypt. Crammed with revelations, Horne's robust profile divulges that Macmillan's wife Dorothy had a romantic affair that nearly wrecked their marriage and lasted until her death. Horne portrays Macmillan as Churchill's right-hand man during the darkest days of WW II, hopping from meetings with Ike and de Gaulle to Finland and Casablanca. He rebuts charges that Macmillan conspired to repatriate and thus send to their doom tens of thousands of Cossacks, White Russians and Yugoslavs after the war. Photos. (Mar.)