Pitt without office would be meagre fare for a biographer and, quite understandably, his career pattern dictates the structure of Dr Turner's book. For all but five and a half of those 25 years he held cabinet office and for almost 20 of them he occupied the highest post. This is no criticism: Pitt became a member of parliament eight months before his twenty-second birthday and remained so until his premature death five months before his forty-seventh. In common with other biographers, Dr Turner finds it next to impossible to separate the person from the politician. No manuscript sources have been used and there is no bibliography, but the text and extensive endnotes indicate a careful exploitation of key primary sources in print and up to date historiography. Aware of the difficulty of saying anything new about Pitt, and conscious of the plethora of recent work, he offers instead a thorough, competent and tenacious analysis of Pitt's political life and an effective synthesis of modern scholarship. Surrounded by this abundance, Dr Turner does not promise, nor does he provide, any startlingly novel interpretation. And all these efforts stand in the shadow of John Ehrman's trilogy (1969-96).
In April 1998 an entire number of History was devoted to aspects of Pitt's political career.
In addition to Michael Duffy's excellent volume in the 'Profiles in Power' series (2000) and the Lancaster pamphlet of Eric Evans, there is William Hague's full-length biography (2004), written with the stylistic elegance associated with Roy Jenkins. In recent years William Pitt the Younger has received a very substantial amount of historical attention.
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