Thorpe's first book, The Uncrowned Prime Ministers (1980), examined the careers of Austen Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and R. A. Butler, three men who came close to reaching the "top of the greasy pole" (Disraeli's phrase,[4] applied by Thorpe to Home's ascent to the premiership[5]).
Indeed, a feature of Thorpe’s biographical trilogy was that all three subjects, though having each held two of the three great offices of the British state (Eden and Home, in addition to being Prime Minister, both served more than one term as Foreign Secretary), tended, in retrospect, to be underestimated.
Lloyd was remembered as Eden’s compliant Foreign Secretary at the time of Suez who, as Chancellor, was dismissed ignominiously by Harold Macmillan in a major Cabinet reshuffle (the so-called "Night of the Long Knives") in 1962; Home, then a hereditary peer, seemed too many an unlikely choice to succeed Macmillan as Prime Minister in 1963 and narrowly lost a general election less than a year later; and Eden, though widely admired for his work at the Foreign Office, attracted, after his short, but momentous premiership, the famous judgement of Tacitus on the Roman Emperor Galba, Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset[7] ("All would have pronounced him worthy of empire if he had never been emperor").
After completing Eden, Thorpe began work on a biography of Harold Macmillan, which was published by Chatto & Windus in 2010.
[8] It was described by Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University, as 'the best biography of a post-war British Prime Minister yet written.'