Antonia Fraser's massive biography, "Cromwell: The Lord Protector," attempts, she tells us, to rescue the personality of Oliver Cromwell from the obscurity into which … it had fallen." The author draws heavily on, and pays generous tribute to, the mass of recent, more analytical scholarship on the English Revolution of 1640–1660…. It is fluently, but not vividly written, with an integrity that spurns shortcuts and oversimplifications, and is based on careful research in the sources, including a few relatively unfamiliar ones. Biographies of Cromwell—good, bad, and indifferent—abound, but there is in fact no earlier one which provides a straightforward, detailed narrative of the man's career on anything like this scale.

Cromwell's ambivalences have always fascinated historians…. The tension between the man of action and "the man of introspection" is at the center of Lady Antonia's character-analysis. She brings together a good deal of evidence about Oliver's medical history...