The sadist who wrecked New York, and the last of the great biographers

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Robert Caro

The Bodley Head, pp.1246, £35, ISBN: 9781847923646

It is something of a mystery why the Bodley Head has decided to publish Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in Britain more than 40 years after the initial appearance in the US of this classic work — but better late than never. Caro’s remarkable portrait of New York City’s master planner Robert Moses merits publication in any language, at any moment in time.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £28 Tel: 08430 600033. John R. MacArthur is president of Harper’s magazine and author of You Can’t Be President and L’Illusion Obama.

TaggedAl Smith, Baron Haussmann, Belle Moskowitz, Book review - biography, bulldozing, construction, Cross-Bronx Expressway, East Tremont, Jones Beach State park, Long Island, New York, Robert Moses, South Shore, W. Kingsland Macy

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The sadist who wrecked New York, and the last of the great biographers

The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s classic biography of Robert Moses is a monument to a bureaucratic monster — and a style of life-writing that has almost died out

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