The world gets nostalgic for great men. Plutarch felt similarly wistful around A.D. 100, when he wrote his wonderful Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans--shrewd side-by-side comparative biographies of dozens of bygone political characters: Demosthenes and Cicero, for example, Caesar and Alexander.
In Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Random House; 490 pages), Jon Meacham, the No. 2 editor at Newsweek, has written a handsomely Plutarchan study that weaves together the lives, characters and fates of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the years of their wartime partnership. Most of the anecdotes have been...
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