One difficulty about writing a Churchill biography is that your subject has done it already ( My Early Life, The World Crisis, The Second World War) with inimitable verve. Roberts trucks efficiently through a familiar sequence of narrow squeaks – escape from the Boers, some near-death experiences, the Dardanelles and Gold Standard disasters. At more than 1,100 pages, this is a big beast that’s virile and mobile. You will look in vain here for the Churchill of revisionist demonology: the war criminal, domestic dictator, or holocaust denier. Churchill becomes the mirror in which bewildered Britons can find consoling fantasies of national greatness “I have taken more out of alcohol,” he once admitted, “than alcohol has taken out of me.” Against the evidence, Roberts claims, oddly, that Churchill was only drunk in wartime on 6 July 1944. An inveterate drinker, rarely the worse for wear, he was never less than outrageously quotable.
His Churchill is both English and American, a grandee and a democrat, a gambler, soldier, dreamer, artist, windbag, butterfly-fancier, journalist, scriptwriter, novelist, wit, and “cry baby” (the Duke of Windsor’s nickname for his lachrymose apologist).Ĭhurchill could be monstrous and lovable almost in the same breath, but he seems to have known himself well enough, confiding to a friend that he was “arrogant but not conceited”. Roberts takes us back to the highly entertaining bundle of contradictions sponsored by a life that plucked success from the jaws of failure. Now, in the age of Brexit, Churchill becomes the mirror in which bewildered Britons can find consoling fantasies of national greatness. Both Roy Jenkins and Boris Johnson found new angles of approach to this protean subject. Besides, if you don’t fancy Roberts’s version, there are more than 1,000 Churchill biographies. Better a biographer with sneaking admiration than one who embarks on a psychological guerrilla war with his subject. This is certainly one way to illuminate a myth, without descending into hagiography. Roberts not only revels in the ironies and paradoxes of the past, as Churchill did, he is more than a little in thrall to the old bruiser’s intoxicating aura. Churchill is possibly the historian’s dream, a true life hero who adored his island’s story, which he lived and wrote about during a roller-coaster career.
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