Caro refers to Moses as “the best bill drafter in Albany”, the state capital, and then, 50 pages later – his newly acquired power having bred severe enmity – “the most hated man in Albany”.

Caro writes of the “harsh alchemy” it performed on his character, “eating away at some traits, allowing others to enlarge”. But, once Moses gained power, he refused to let it go. As a young man he had been a reformer, an advocate for good, enlightened government. He studied at Yale University before going on to Oxford, where he carried out research for a PhD thesis about the British civil service. Moses was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1888. Subsequently the author has written four volumes of a biography of Lyndon B Johnson. (It was Caro’s first book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1975. Originally published in the US in 1974, and now published for the first time in Britain and Ireland, the book is over 1,300 pages in length, and I lugged it in my backpack for months as a hefty reminder of Moses’s profoundly mixed, yet undeniably impressive, achievements – and of Caro’s dogged, steely reportorial excellence. Its ambition, which is vast, matches the scale of vision of its subject. Almost every public project of any significance had to go through him. For a substantial period of his career, he held 12 chairmanships of New York authorities, acting as the City Parks Commissioner, the head of the State Parks Council and the State Power Commission, amongst others. A master urban planner, Moses radically changed the character of the city by means of the gargantuan road, bridge and park projects he undertook over the course of his lengthy career.Ī skilful drafter of legislation, Moses secured a scarcely credible level of power and tenure – the mayors and governors who came and went during his 44 years of power found, to their cost, that he was effectively unsackable. Robert Caro’s monumental biography provides ample evidence that the vision of one man, Robert Moses, profoundly shaped twentieth-century New York.

The power broker author robert