CROMWELL

The popular biographer, best known for her portraits of British royalty, turns her sympathetic eye to the Puritan rebel Oliver Cromwell, another worthy subject in the Great Lives series from Grove. Kirkus (Sept. 15, 1973, p. 1069) noted that Fraser was determined to humanize the righteous and arrogant Lord Protector, presenting him as “a fallible, paradoxical and essentially melancholic figure.” But, still, she didn’t downplay his cruelties: his joy at the execution of King Charles, and his vendetta against the Irish. Fraser, we contended, made Cromwell out “to be a kinder, more patient and conciliatory man than one had hitherto suspected . . . a man rooted in the English countryside.” Her evocation of this period’s religious and political complexity exceeds even that of some scholars: “a majestic work.”