The mass of books about Winston Churchill can be moved about only like armored divisions on ocean freighters. Nearing completion of the final volume of documents to be published by Hillsdale College in the official biography of Sir Winston, I am guilty myself of adding to the tonnage. The final one is volume 23 of the documents, to which must be added the biography's eight heavy narrative volumes! Anyone connected with that project must be proud but also a little conscience stricken.
Andrew Roberts is the latest culprit, and he too is well aware of the problem. He begins the final chapter of Churchill: Walking with Destiny with his subject's admission: “Far too much has been and is being written about me.” This quotation is from the 1920s, decades before Churchill died, almost a century before this book! Even Churchill could have had little idea what was coming.
What can justify this book? A historian to the core, Roberts answers that only now have the last sources become available, chiefly the diaries of King George VI, Soviet ambassador to Britain Ivan Maisky, and Churchill's children. Also recently opened are the verbatim reports of the War Cabinet meetings. Those and other new items are put to good use here.
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But that is not the most important thing. The real justification is that this book is excellent, and there is always room for more of that. This is the best biography of Winston Churchill written since 1991, when Sir Martin Gilbert published his one-volume Churchill: A Life. It has the adventure, energy, and incessant movement that Churchill produced. It is witty, fluent, and precise, in rhythm with the material. It gallops across decades and through the largest episodes in history. Not even William Manchester, who made mistakes and did not finish, has had so much fun writing about Churchill.
Roberts's own life has been a kind of preparation for the trial of writing this book. With studies like Eminent Churchillians (1994), Hitler and Churchill (2003), and Masters and Commanders (2008), he has been moving nearer Churchill for decades in what now seems a strategy of envelopment. His very first book was Holy Fox (1991), a biography of Edward Wood, first Earl of Halifax, one of Churchill's closest colleagues and opponents. Halifax was associated with Neville Chamberlain in the policy of appeasement; Churchill was their leading opponent. Viceroy of India when Gandhi became the leader of the Congress Party, Halifax made concessions to Gandhi that Churchill opposed. On May 10, 1940, Halifax and Churchill sat in a room with Chamberlain to decide which of them would become prime minister. When in late May 1940 the British Cabinet decided to rebuff an appeal through Mussolini for parley with Hitler, Halifax was the man who brought the offer and for an anxious time suggested its acceptance. Halifax was later Churchill's ambassador to Washington, where all hope resided. These are fateful stories in history and in the life of Churchill, and Andrew studied them for a long time and from another point of view before he began work on the great man himself.
Also Roberts has his own special relationship with America, of which Churchill was half a son, and to which he looked more than once to save the world. Andrew has lived here, and he is the son of the franchisee of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the United Kingdom. If you can make an informed choice between original and extra crispy, you have learned America.
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