James Delingpole James Delingpole

Turns out life’s not so easy – just look at Ulysses S. Grant

When Winston Churchill was at the nadir of his career, he wrote a biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. In his wilderness years he needed to be reminded that even the greatest men of destiny go through periods when it all seems pretty hopeless. ‘Every taunt, however bitter; every tale, however petty; every charge, however shameful, for which the incidents of a long career could afford a pretext, has been levelled against him,’ Churchill wrote. Those Blenheim Palaces and Finest Hours: they don’t just give themselves away, you know.

I wish someone had told me this when I was younger. Unfortunately, like many of us, I suffered the misfortune of having parents who kept telling me how very special I was. This gave me the mistaken impression that life is a piece of piss and that so long as you work hard, do a bit of exercise and are generally nice to people everything will work out fine. Whereas in fact, as most of us have discovered by the time we’ve reached 50, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

As a corrective to such naivety, I heartily recommend Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It’s a doorstopper of a book (by the author of Hamilton, on which the musical is based): too heavy to take on the train, requiring a cushion to rest on in bed, lest it crush your bollocks. But besides telling you lots of invaluable stuff you probably didn’t know (Mexican-American war 1846-1848, anyone?) it’s a rollercoaster ride. It takes you from lows of the most exquisite schadenfreude to extraordinary highs which make you wonder: ‘Well maybe there is a divine plan for everything, after all.’

On first glance, Grant was one of those great historical figures you wouldn’t have minded being: arguably the greatest American Civil War general, later president of the US, but also a supremely kind and likeable man, loved by his wife Julia and his kids (one of whom, Fred, he took aged 12 to the siege of Vicksburg where a bullet grazed his thigh), and with certain skills akin to superpowers.

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