Thomas Babington Macaulay was a critic, member of Parliament, cabinet minister, member of the Supreme Council of India, author of the third most popular book of poems in the nineteenth century after John Keble's The Christian Year (1827) and Tennyson's Poems (1842), and the most successful historian of his age, but his position in cultural history is equivocal. At the age of twenty-five, he astonished all of Britain with an essay on Milton. In his early thirties, he helped achieve parliamentary reform; during his four years in India he codified the Indian penal code and his "Minute on Education" changed Indian history by making English the language of education in that country. After returning from India to London, he served in British governments and planned his monumental history of England from the Great Rebellion of 1688 to the Great Reform of 1832. He spent the last twenty years of his life writing...