Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts (review)

Abstract

Review Article Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Andrew Roberts (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 1144 pages Winston Churchill’s life has a fairy tale quality complete with as happy an ending as is possible in this world. After years in the political wilderness issuing unheeded warnings about the dangers of Hitler’s Germany, he emerges in his mid-sixties in 1940 as the leader who saves his beloved Britain from defeat in the Second World War. He goes on to enjoy an old age honoured worldwide as a champion of liberty for defeating the evil Nazis and acclaimed in Britain as one of the great figures in its history, about which he had written copiously and which meant so much to him. Add to that a memorable, well-documented life story full of human interest, ups and downs and much adventure, including many brushes with death, as well as a colourful, albeit controversial, personality and prowess as an orator, writer and artist and you have a biographer’s dream subject. It is little wonder that many have warmed to the task. Some have come close to hagiography, while others have been debunking or sought to reveal scandals. There have been works focusing on specific aspects of his life, such as Paul Bew’s Churchill and Ireland and David Lough’s No More Champagne, a study of his disorderly finances; these provide valuable supplements and some correctives to more general biographies. The most authoritative general biography was the six-volume official one commenced by Churchill’s journalist son, Randolph, but almost all written by the English-Jewish historian Martin Gilbert, published between 1966 and 1988. It was a fine scholarly work, supplemented by companion volumes of materials, but suffers from the inevitable bias of official biographies in favour of their subject. After Gilbert the most read biography was by former Labour minister and European commissioner Roy Jenkins, published in 2001. Like Churchill, Jenkins had combined active politics and historical writing, which gave him good insights. This, together with his arresting style, made the book eminently readable. It was, however, written from secondary sources; there was little or no original research. It was less highly regarded by professional historians than it was popular with the general public. Studies • volume 108 • number 432 483 Winter 2019/20: Review Article In attempting to crown his career as an historian of British Conservatism and of the Second World War with a new biography of Churchill, Andrew Roberts justifies his venture by reference to some new material not available to previous biographers. Among these are records of Churchill’s wartime audiences with King George VI and the diaries of the Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky. It is destined to be the most read biography of Churchill in the coming years and so merits exacting review. It is a fine work, justly acclaimed. However, despite being almost 1000 pages long and having numerous footnotes, the book cannot be ranked as definitive; there are too many errors of fact or statements supported only by a secondary source, or no source at all, for it to be so described. Some important episodes are not treated. The index is imperfect. While criticisms of Churchill are quoted and some made by the author himself, the general tenor is laudatory, sometimes excessively so. The author does best making Churchill, with his unique personality, come alive in the pages of the book. He is fortunate to have had at his disposal so many contemporary accounts in the form of diaries of those who worked closely with Churchill or were otherwise able to observe him closely and record his bons mots. Most of these were during Second World War, when Churchill was prime minister and ‘on a high’, exhilarated by his own central role in the unfolding drama. There was something manic about Churchill’s impetuosity and his recklessness in face of danger, not to mention his compulsive jocularity. The author is not blind to this or to Churchill’s moodiness and volatility, but does not accept that Churchill should be labelled a manic depressive. In so far as mood swings unrelated to outside events are a feature of this condition, this view may be justified. But...