What happens when the big clunking fist picks up the historian’s pen? Gordon Brown is by no means the first Prime Minister-in-Waiting to have published a work of history: Churchill’s The Story of the Malakand Field Force appeared in 1898, more than 40 years before he succeeded Chamberlain. Brown’s collection of essays on eight courageous individuals invites inevitable comparison with John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, published four years before he became president.

But what makes the Chancellor’s exploration of courage so intriguing and the book so readable is its intensely personal character. This is not another tedious campaign memoir or book-as-manifesto. It is, instead, an unexpectedly candid act of moral self-examination and deliberation.

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