D. R. Thorpe


David Richard Thorpe, MBE, FRHistS was a British historian and biographer of three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom during the mid-20th century; Sir Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan.

Biography

Thorpe was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He taught history at Charterhouse, a public school in Surrey, for over 30 years. Among other academic appointments, he was an Archives Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford and Brasenose College, Oxford.

Works

Thorpe's first book, The Uncrowned Prime Ministers, examined the careers of Austen Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and R. A. Butler, three men who came close to reaching the "top of the greasy pole". He was subsequently the official biographer of the former Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Commons Selwyn Lloyd and of Alec Douglas-Home and Anthony Eden.
As with Sir Robert Rhodes James's earlier official biography of Eden, Thorpe's, which was undertaken at the invitation of Eden's widow, Clarissa, in 1991, did much to restore Eden's reputation, which had suffered considerably in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Indeed, a feature of Thorpe’s biographical trilogy was that all three subjects, though having each held two of the three great offices of the British state, tended, in retrospect, to be underestimated. Lloyd was remembered as Eden’s compliant Foreign Secretary at the time of Suez who, as chancellor, was dismissed ignominiously by Harold Macmillan in a major Cabinet reshuffle in 1962; Home, then a hereditary peer, seemed to many an unlikely choice to succeed Macmillan as prime minister in 1963 and narrowly lost a general election less than a year later; and Eden, though widely admired for his work at the Foreign Office, attracted, after his short, but momentous premiership, the famous judgement of Tacitus on the Roman Emperor Galba, Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset.
After completing Eden, Thorpe began work on a biography of Harold Macmillan, which was published by Chatto & Windus in 2010. It was described by Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University, as 'the best biography of a post-war British Prime Minister yet written.' The book was one of the six books shortlisted for the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing in 2010, and in 2011 was awarded the biennial English Speaking Union Marsh Biography Award.

Awards and honours