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The fourth volume of Robert Caro's monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson covers roughly six years - from the late 1950s manoeuvring for the 1960 Democratic nomination through to Johnson's first State of the Union address in January 1964. It is both the most dramatically compressed and the most emotionally resonant instalment in the series so far.

The book splits naturally into two halves. The first traces Johnson's disastrous non-campaign for the presidency in 1960, his miscalculation of Kennedy as a lightweight, and the tortured backroom negotiations that landed him on the ticket as vice president. What follows is a portrait of political humiliation that borders on the physically painful to read. The man who had bent the entire United States Senate to his will found himself stripped of all meaningful influence, marginalised by an administration that neither trusted nor respected him. Caro renders these vice-presidential years with an almost suffocating intimacy - Johnson's depression, his growing irrelevance, the quiet cruelty of being frozen out of the Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations.

Then comes Dallas, and the book transforms entirely. Caro's account of the assassination and its immediate aftermath is staggeringly good - more vivid and more revealing than almost anything else written on those terrible days. Johnson's metamorphosis from a hollowed-out vice president into a commanding chief executive unfolds with the pace and tension of a political thriller. Within weeks he is manoeuvring Kennedy's stalled legislative agenda through Congress, seizing the initiative on civil rights with a mastery that Kennedy himself likely could not have matched, and launching the War on Poverty. It is Johnson at his absolute best - his political genius, his genuine compassion for the dispossessed, and his ferocious will all working in concert.

Running through the entire volume is the blood feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, a mutual loathing so deep and so personal that Caro renders it with almost Shakespearean intensity. Their rivalry is not merely political but existential, and it gives the book an emotional undercurrent that elevates it beyond straight narrative history.

The volume is not without its familiar Caro-isms. The prose occasionally sprawls into labyrinthine sentences that lose their grammatical footing before reaching a full stop. Certain phrases and quotations reappear with a frequency that will test the patience of attentive readers. And the treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis has drawn fair criticism for oversimplifying where Johnson and Robert Kennedy actually stood on the key decisions. The narrowed point of view - seeing events almost exclusively through Johnson's eyes - also makes this a less expansive work than Master of the Senate, sacrificing some of the broader contextual digressions that enriched the earlier volumes.

But these are quibbles against a towering achievement. The Passage of Power is biography operating at the highest level - meticulously researched, psychologically penetrating, and written with a narrative drive that makes its 605 pages feel urgent rather than indulgent. It captures a pivotal hinge point in American history and, more remarkably, leaves you desperate for the next volume. That, after four books and several thousand pages on the same subject, is no small feat.