Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts

This important book is huge-982 pages of text-by a prize-winning biographer and about one of the most important men of the 20th century. Since it is now more than 50 years since Winston Churchill's death, Andrew Roberts had available a prodigious amount of material earlier biographers could not consult. It looks as though he read all of it, published and archival-biographies, memoirs, histories, diaries, log books, note books, George Vi's notes of their weekly conferences, etc., etc. What emerges is a fascinating, vast, comprehensive, copiously researched and annotated triumph. (Several times we learn about a meeting or lunch from what the mistress of one of the men who were there confided to her diary.)

Winston was born in 1874 into an important aristocratic family with a brilliantly successful political father and an American mother of great wealth and beauty, both of them too busy with their political and social lives to give Winston the love and attention he longed for as a boy, and indeed for all of his life. For some reason, he was convinced from his teen years that he was destined to save England and to die young. As a result, he took great risks to establish himself early as a military hero. He was in fact a hero of the Boer War and served with distinction in the trenches of World War I. He venerated the British Empire.

Roberts reports Churchill's complex life in scrupulous detail-his wooing of the beauty who became his wife and lifelong love and support, Clementine; his several cabinet posts during WW I; his fidelity to the values as a Tory Democrat, while shifting parties; his early championing of the tank; his being the founding godfather of the RAF, and more. Churchill was a talented painter, a butterfly fancier, bricklayer, military strategist, public speaker, historian. Inheriting almost no money, he supported himself and Clemmie by writing thirty-some published books. Because of his brilliantly witty speeches, as a Member of Parliament, he always filled the house and never disappointed. Early on, he identified both Bolshevism and Nazism as despicable dangers to be not appeased but fiercely opposed.

When the imminent fall of France in 1940 vaulted him into the office of Prime Minister, he rose to the occasion like the man of destiny he was, rallying the British people through oratory and example to stand heroically alone against Hitler's Nazi Germany-until Hitler made the fatal mistake of attacking Soviet Russia and Japan made a similar mistake of committing Pearl Harbor. He did indeed save Britain. Andrews covers fully the Gallipoli campaign, Churchill's unearned reputation as a drunk, his fidelity as a friend. Winston died in 1965 at 90 years of age. This book is fittingly long and a compelling read about a great man.