Books

Churchill and the media is a larger story than author Toye tells, and the omissions are as disappointing as the assertions are disconcerting.

Smith is clear that Churchill was a believer in a faith. And that faith was at the heart of his appeal to the British people in the Second World War.

The main concern for Pilecki at Auschwitz was the fate of Poles, but in describing that of the Jews he asked a stark question: “Were we all people”?

During the war Churchill told a general: “Improvise and dare…He improvise and dore.” Leebaert sees America’s walk to global leadership in much the same way.

On the Raj, Tharoor offers a half-truth, which, “like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.”

The Biography “is true, insofar as diligence and research can establish truth…. All an author can offer is a fragment of reality—that, and the hope that it will endure.” —William Manchester

Never Flinch, Never Weary chronicles a time when mankind stood “uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.”

Clews paints a loyal but frustrated Churchill who later defined the rule of the Phoney War: “Don’t be unkind to the enemy; you will only make him angry.”

The Splendid and the Vile is the story of the London Blitz, from the moment that Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, until the Luftwaffe raid that destroyed the parts of the House of Commons exactly one year later, coincidentally on the same night that Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland.

For non-Russian-reading researchers, this book is indispensable. For aficionados of the history of the Second World War, it is a thought-provoking delight.

Our grief and loss are deeply felt. Paul was a gentleman scholar: a man of strong convictions, who never let them interfere with his search for truth. Hagiography is fatal. Honesty matters. Those were his cardinal precepts. Above all, he left a corpus of excellence from which young people will always learn things worth knowing. His work abides, and as Churchill said, a man never dies as long as he is remembered. All who love history will forever remember Paul Addison.

A close Anglo-American partnership was a guiding principle in Churchill’s thinking about international relations. The creation of such a partnership was a central aspect of his long political career. While still a young backbench Member of Parliament, he said, “it ought to be the main end of English statecraft over a long period of years to cultivate good relations with the United States.” In 1918 he declared it his hope that the two countries would “act permanently together.”