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Is This the Best One-Volume Biography of Churchill Yet Written?
By Richard Aldous
CHURCHILL: Walking With Destiny
By Andrew Roberts
In April 1955, on the final weekend before he left office for the last time, Winston Churchill had the vast canvas of Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Lion and the Mouse” taken down from the Great Hall at the prime ministerial retreat of Chequers. He had always found the depiction of the mouse too indistinct, so he retrieved his paint brushes and set about “improving” on the work of Rubens by making the hazy rodent clearer. “If that is not courage,” Lord Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord, said later, “I do not know what is.”
Martin Gilbert wrote a great one, too. Manchester's is a little less rigorous, but is beautifully written (The first two volumes, anyway. The third was completed after Manchester's death by someone who lacked narrative gifts). I received the Roberts version for Christmas. After I finish a project in early January, I'm sitting down with the thing.
I have a one volume by Roy Jenkins....quite a tome at over 1000 pages. But certainly readable....a few chapters here and there otherwise I'd be overwhelmed.
Too busy catching up with Brangelina and the Kardashians?
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