TY - BOOK AU - Robert E. Sullivan TI - Macaulay - The Tragedy of Power SN - 9788125040439 U1 - 941.081092 B SUL-M PY - 2010/// PB - Orient BlackSwan KW - Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron, 1800-1859. Historians--Great Britain--Biography. Authors, English--19th century--Biography. Statesmen--Great Britain--Biography. Great Britain--Politics and government--1800-1837 N1 - Heir -- Star -- Legislator -- Sinister prophet -- Statesman -- Empire builder -- The last ancient historian -- The lion -- Baron Macaulay of Rothley -- Procrastinator -- Praeceptor gentis anglorum -- A broken heart -- Envoi : immortal N2 - On the 150th anniversary of the death of the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portrait of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire and the impact of ideas. His Macaulay is a Janus-faced master of the universe: a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a forceful advocate for reforming Whig politics but a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian, yet a skeptic and a secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters.Perhaps best known in India for the insolent tone of the Minute of 1835 and the drafting of the Criminal Procedure Code, Macaulay's History of England is a celebrated western classic. His father ensured that ancient Greek and Latin literature shaped Macaulay's mind, but he crippled his heir emotionally. Self-defense taught Macaulay that power, calculation, and duplicity rule politics and human relations. In Macaulay's writings, Sullivan unearths a sinister vision of progress that prophesied twentieth-century genocide. That the reverent portrait fashioned by Macaulay's distinguished extended family eclipsed his insistent rhetoric about race, subjugation, and civilizing slaughter testifies to the grip of moral obliviousness ER -