Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell was one of the most loved – and hated – politicians of the twentieth century. His death was treated like that of an ex-Prime Minister. But this was a man who, largely through his own quixotry, sat in the Cabinet for just fifteen months during a parliamentary career of thirty-seven years.

This was the politician who proclaimed, twenty years before Margaret Thatcher, what came to be seen as the principles of Thatcherism. Yet to see Powell in this context is just to skim the surface. Besides his other political acts he was a Professor of Greek at the ago of twenty-five, brigadier at the age of thirty-two, a poet, biblical scholar and devoted family man. His was a life whose range and emotional intensity are still barely understood. This definitive biography is the only one for which Powell specifically granted interviews, and the first to draw on Powell’s massive private archive.