S. R. Gardiner called Cromwell the greatest of Englishmen, but when he came to write his little book on Oliver's place in English history the phrase acquired no substance. More recent studies also never achieve anything much better than adequacy…. Oliver, in the end, defeated [all his biographers]. He has now defeated Lady Antonia Fraser who, drowning in the morass, drags the reader after her.

[Cromwell, Our Chief of Men] is certainly the biggest book on Cromwell—well over 700 pages of it. It rests on honest and hard work; it embodies solid reading in printed materials and some acquaintance with unpublished manuscripts; its prose, never meretricious, varies from the competent to the unexciting. Reading this interminable book is made no easier by occasional lapses in grammatical structure and a cavalier attitude to commas. The author is not always certain of her words: 'unexceptional' for 'unexceptionable' contrasts with 'inimicable'...