Randolph S. Churchill

Josh Ireland begins with potted inaccuracies, but the quickly picks up with a deft, thoughtful account of a short, bittersweet saga.

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

Rather than advancing segregation in South Africa, Churchill strove hard for justice, arrayed against the broad prejudices of his time. Part 1: 1902-09

Randolph Churchill’s career in journalism lasted thirty-six years. He wrote hundreds of articles, edited seven volumes of his father’s speeches, and published fifteen books, including the first seven narrative and document volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the official biography.

Never Flinch, Never Weary, 1951-1965 is the twenty-third volume of documents in the official biography of Winston Churchill. Together with the narrative texts, the work comprises thirty-one volumes in all. It is the last step in a journey that began over half a century ago, but prepared for decades earlier.

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.

In the best biography since 1991, Roberts's witty, fluent, flowing prose captures the adventure, energy, and incessant movement that Churchill produced.

The allegations that Winston Churchill was unfaithful while on holiday in the South of France in the mid-1930s have been knocking around for eighty years, with nothing substantial to back them up, and, having been researching a biography of Churchill for the past four years, I do not believe it.

There was no more enigmatic figure in Churchill’s life than Brendan Bracken, who cloaked his birth and upbringing with mystery while hinting broadly that he was the great man’s illegitimate son. It is well-authenticated that close friendship, not errant fatherhood, encompassed their relationship. But Churchill, with characteristic impishness, apparently never gave the direct lie to Bracken’s implied claim. This annoyed Churchill’s wife and peeved his son, Randolph, who spoke satirically of  “my brother, the bastard.” To quell the noisome rumor Churchill quipped: “I have looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”

He combined two qualities: generous loyalty to those he loved, and an acid tongue and pen for those he didn’t. Most of the latter, I tend to think, richly deserved what they got. Randolph Churchill’s public persona was based on the latter quality. In the mid-1950s, surgery revealed that a tumor on his lung was benign. His friend Evelyn Waugh burst into the bar at White’s Club: “They’ve cut out the only part of Randolph that isn’t malignant!”

The author has done an exemplary job reporting this major North American encounter by a Churchill still in his fifties. Cynics will say, why bother? Well, because it needed to be done.