Nor does he pull his punches when it comes to Churchill’s many mistakes, either. He writes with supreme authority, brio and no small amount of panache of Churchill’s exhilarating life, from his birth in 1874, to his death ninety years later.
But Roberts never falls into the punji hole of trying to out-Churchill Churchill. The greatest challenge of writing a biography of Churchill is that Churchill has already done it inimitably ( My Early Life, The World Crisis, The Second World War). We all know the headlines – his rousing speeches play on a perpetual loop at the back of Britain’s national psyche – but Andrew Roberts’ exceptional biography gets further beneath the skin of the old bruiser than anyone – bar, perhaps, the man himself – has before. "But I do believe that I am a glow worm."Īnd glow he did. "We are all worms," Winston Churchill once told a friend. It remains undefeated in its category.Ĭhurchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts (2018) This is a heavyweight biography from a world-champion historian. And yet he convinced a nation that a brutal genocidal war was a good idea, and that he had the chops to take on the world. Here was a man, plagued by paranoia, Parkinson’s Disease and arteriosclerosis who had no firm ideas beyond a gut-deep hatred of Bolsheviks, poor social skills and a quite chronic case of donkey breath. Kershaw’s examination of how a "spoilt child turned into the would-be macho man" is unrivalled, not only in its breadth and depth, but in its richness of character. Fortunately, Ian Kershaw has spent a lot of time there – and he knows the scenic route.įar from the puffed-up political strongman that history remembers, Kershaw paints a portrait of an idle, tasteless, disillusioned loafer who got lucky.
To read this book is to ride shotgun through the mangled mind of a maniac – a mind so twisted, dark and terrifyingly pathetic that it demands a guide.
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