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David Owen with his government experience provides insight, though not enough of it, on War Cabinet machinations in the power struggle of May 1940.

Michael McMenamin praises Shakespeare's "Six Minutes In May" for its coherent, fascinating account of Churchill's rise to power in conjunction with Hitler's aggression in the West.

There seems to be a new trend in publishing: serious books in a format once the preserve of books for young people. Last year we had Cate Ludlow’s attractive "I Love Winston Churchill: 400 Fantastic Facts." Now, at the same keen price, we have this title by Richard Wiles in a series which already offers “graphic biographies” of Jane Austen, Cézanne, Leonardo and Shakespeare.

Dunkirk, produced by Christopher Nolan, sets out to portray the 1940 rescue of the Allied armies from the clutches of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in terms of courage, heroism, survival, and a few examples of cowardice. In that he succeeds admirably. In terms of context—in conveying an understanding of what Dunkirk was about—he fails utterly.

One must not expect an austere academic compendium, but this does not mean that this small album would be out of place in a university library. Its attractive layout has a lot to say for it when one bears in mind how difficult is it sometimes to persuade students to read anything not on their syllabus.

Churchill’s understanding of France, and its potential for good and ill, begins with his biography of Marlborough, redolent with his lifetime theme of resisting continental tyrants.

HRH The Duke of Edinburgh has the first copy. The Duke of Marlborough has the second, and Sir Winston Churchill’s great-grandson Randolph (who wrote the foreword) ordered eight as Christmas presents. You should have one, if you are a total-immersion Churchillian with a penchant for the extraordinary, for Winston’s Island, the Isle of Wight, has its unique claim to a place in the saga.

Why does the United States honor Winston Churchill on April 9? Why not, for example, May 10? That was the day in 1940 when, with liberty in retreat, he became Britain’s prime minister, sure that he knew a good deal about it all, certain he would not fail, impatient for the morning. But April 9 has its own significance for Americans. That was the day, in 1963, when President Kennedy proclaimed Sir Winston an honorary citizen of the United States.

"We will never again have so thorough a record of any statesman’s decision making, and certainly not of one so great, in a war so vast and consequential. Indulge your Churchillian obsession with the latest volume of war documents, and behold the labor that his leadership required."

Churchill had an affinity for a good phrase, and stored them in his capacious memory for deployment when the time was right. He occasionally used them without credit to the author, innocently assuming that anyone with an ounce of education would recognize them on sight.

I have sent a few emails asking why Churchill sold Eastern Europe to Stalin. ​Eastern Europeans do not look admiringly at Mr. Churchill...like my father who fought with the British, in his Polish uniform.

With the Nazis gazing at Dover’s cliffs from twenty miles across the English Channel, he “mobilized the English language,” as the journalist Ed Murrow remarked, “and sent it into battle.”