James W. Muller

The River War is remarkable because of its author, length, content and audacity. The author was already a rising political star, having run and lost for Parliament. At 962 pages, the book analyzed the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan, a conflict largely forgotten today—except for its dramatic concluding event, one of history’s last great cavalry charges, in which Churchill himself participated.

McKercher and Capet have provided a collection of substantive and challenging essays. Their book offers many useful observations that will stimulate further historical discussion and scholarship.

Churchill was a bigger man, and his literary works are richer, than this historian’s thesis. The Literary Churchill advances our knowledge of Churchill’s intellectual life, but more sustained attention to Churchill’s books would have made it better.