Readers will gain an insight and understanding of modern western political leadership from this collection of profiles. They include former US presidents Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama and UK prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Runciman argues these profiles tell us more about the office the subjects held rather than the subjects themselves.

Lyndon Johnson was the consummate – though conviction-free – politician. Robert Caro has written a seminal – and many would say consummate – biographical series of Johnson, still to be completed. Caro argues the higher Johnson rose in political office, the more we “get to see the person behind the political mask”. Caro agrees power corrupts but it also “reveals”. Runciman has the opposite view: the presidency didn’t reveal truths about Johnson but he revealed truths about the presidency.

“The person who arrives at the summit of politics is recognisably the same as the person who comes down from it,” Runciman writes. “Who they really are is set well in advance. What changes are the circumstances in which they find themselves and their expectation of what can be done while they are there.”

These profiles are eye-openers. To be human is to be flawed and political leaders’ flaws are more profound. Runciman includes a chapter on those who didn’t make it which includes US Democratic Party presidential hopeful John Edwards

These profiles were originally published in the London Review of Books and have been updated and changed for the book.

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Recommended if you know what to expect* and like the sound of it. This is a revised collection of David Runciman's essays on US and UK political leaders, each originally published in the LRB. The theme supposed to tie them together is Runciman's contention that, rather than political office revealing the 'true' character of a leader, in fact the leader offers us an opportunity to probe the nature and limits of the office. Honestly, I'm not convinced that this amounts to much more than a convenient way to package and present these essays as a book. But the style is smooth and gently entertaining, and there are enough nuggets of what feels like insight, to make this an enjoyable and possibly worthwhile read.

(I say 'read', but in fact I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated unsurprisingly well (though slowly; I would probably have been annoyed if I had to listen to it at 1x speed) by Runciman himself. This episode of the Talking Politics podcast gives a good idea of what listening to the audiobook is like: https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2019/183-where-power-stops)

Not recommended if you're looking for something meaty, or if you're allergic to anything resembling 'horse-race' and/or personality-based political coverage. Policy questions are sidenotes here, used only to illustrate points about the character of a leader, their political triumphs and missteps, or the constraints and potentials of their office. And Runciman isn't entirely above the occasional authoritative but ill-supported and arguably facile pronouncement. I may have found this annoying if I weren't more or less in his target audience, i.e. milquetoast left-liberal with intellectual pretensions but a taste for comforting certainties. (I think I'm giving the wrong impression at this point; it's not an especially ideological or partisan book, and Runciman is both wryly sceptical and capable of generosity when talking about politicians of any persuasion.)

*I actually didn't know that this was an essay collection until it came up in the afterword, but I did have my suspicions along the way. Some of the chapters feel very much like LRB-style book reviews.

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