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Hard Choices is a memoir that does exactly what its title promises - and simultaneously less. Covering Hillary Clinton's four years as Secretary of State under President Obama, the book offers a sweeping, methodical tour of American foreign policy during one of its most turbulent modern chapters. It is serious, substantive, and at times genuinely absorbing. It is also, unmistakably, a book written with one eye on the next campaign.

The strongest sections are those where Clinton drops the careful political framing and takes the reader inside the room. Her portraits of world leaders are entertaining and occasionally sharp - a fleeting mention of Vladimir Putin's offer to take Bill Clinton on a polar bear tagging expedition is the kind of humanising detail that lifts the narrative above the boilerplate. Similarly, the account of the secret diplomatic groundwork that eventually led to the interim nuclear agreement with Iran is among the most revelatory material in the book, offering a rare glimpse of how back-channel negotiations actually unfold.

Clinton covers an enormous amount of ground - the pivot to Asia, the Afghanistan surge, the Russian reset, the Arab Spring, Syria, the hunt for Osama bin Laden - and the sheer breadth of it can be impressive. Structured thematically rather than chronologically, the book reads at times like an advanced seminar in international relations, packed with policy detail that will reward readers with a genuine interest in how diplomacy works in practice. She goes deep on the reasoning behind key decisions, and her analysis of the forces shaping global affairs is frequently shrewd.

But there is a persistent sense that the book has been vetted within an inch of its life. Controversial subjects are handled with surgical caution. On the NSA's mass surveillance programme, Clinton offers philosophical musing rather than a position. On the Keystone pipeline, she is conspicuously silent. The opening pages are weighed down by the kind of platitudinous language that reads less like memoir and more like stump speech, and that tone resurfaces throughout. Readers hoping for genuine candour - the sort of raw self-examination that elevates a political memoir into something more lasting - will find themselves wanting. There is little here that would trouble any voter, which makes for sensible politics but a somewhat frustrating reading experience.

The personal moments are carefully rationed. Tributes to her daughter Chelsea and her late mother Dorothy are touching but brief. Clinton's admission that her vote to authorise the Iraq War was wrong is notable - more forthright than many of her contemporaries - but even this comes wrapped in qualifications and forward-looking pivot.

At nearly 600 pages, Hard Choices demands commitment. For those with a deep interest in American foreign policy, particularly during the first Obama term, it delivers a detailed and often compelling insider account. As a portrait of the woman behind the policy, it is considerably thinner. This is a book that tells you a great deal about what Clinton did, a fair amount about what she thought, and frustratingly little about who she is. It is competent, polished, and precisely as revealing as it intends to be - not a page more.