Look back, face forward

You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star and scourge of political correctness whose book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a worldwide bestseller, beloved of serious young men seeking intellectual challenge and good old-fashioned fatherly advice. Summary: ‘Sort yourself out, bucko.’ We don’t really need the likes of Peterson here: we’ve got Ferdinand Mount. The book we should all be reading to sort ourselves out, buckos, is Prime Movers.

Mount is, admittedly, an unlikely intellectual hero. Modest and self-deprecating almost to the point of absurdity, in his memoir Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes (2008) he chronicled a life of extraordinary privilege — Eton, Christ Church, head of Mrs Thatcher’s policy unit, editor of the TLS — with the kind of insouciant charm possessed only by those blessed with extraordinary privilege.

Easy to underestimate, Mount should never be underestimated. In a life of public and political service, he has somehow found the time to write a couple of dozen books — including the much underrated Chronicle of Modern Twilight series of novels, clearly inspired by the model of his uncle ‘Tony’ Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time — but Prime Movers is clearly the big one, the summing up, the statement piece, the magnum opus, surely Mount’s last stand.

The book’s rather Molesworthian subtitle — ‘From Pericles to Gandhi: Twelve Great Political Thinkers and What’s Wrong with Each of Them’ — does the book something of a disservice. As Mount rightly points out in his introduction: ‘This is not a collection of hatchet jobs.’ Prime Movers is not Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals (1989) redux, or some awful sub-Strachey.