A very careful book

I liked her enormously and I liked the book about two thirds as much, which I gather is the standard outcome here.

The early chapters are the ones I'd keep. That flat above her great aunt's place, the piano with the broken key, her father getting up for work with MS and never once making it anybody else's problem — I read that whole stretch in one go on a Friday night with a glass of Rioja and the balcony door open, and I was genuinely sorry when the campaign turned up.

Because once the campaign starts you can feel the book putting its coat on. Everything after the first term is measured. Warm, generous, beautifully done, and measured. It's the prose equivalent of a dinner that has been costed to the penny — nothing wrong with any single dish, no surprises either.

The food details are what I hung onto. What they ate, who cooked, the business of trying to keep two children on something like a normal evening routine inside that house. That's the most human thread in the second half and I wanted six times as much of it.

Seven, and it is about my pleasure rather than her achievement, which I should say out loud because they aren't the same number. Who am I to give Michelle Obama a seven? Nobody. If I were rating the life it's a ten and we all know it.