The Tedium Is the Message

In 1953, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description" and praised, somewhat fulsomely, as a writer endowed with the "gift of Cicero's pen." The Swedish Academy singled out his war journalism and six-volume history of World War II for special distinction, though it elided his sole novel, the forgettable "Savrola" (1899).