Peggynoonan.com Website Review

churchill’s adversaries weren’t his enemies the great man had his flaws, but he understood that people are not only political beings. i didn’t intend to write on andrew roberts’s biography of winston churchill, because so many smart people have written on it so well. also, i don’t belong to the churchill cult. he was a great man, arguably the greatest of the 20th century, and right on the central question of his age, the meaning of hitler. he had both political and literary genius, the first western political figure of whom that could be said since lincoln. he was brave and he was a visionary; he understood and wrote about the implications of splitting the atom long before it was split. he was also a person of titanic self-regard driven by a sense of destiny that occasionally verged on the half-mad. he made blunders for which others suffered and forgave himself too quickly and too much. and he was bloody-minded. “i love this war,” he confided to a friend at the height of world war i, when he was first lord of the admiralty. “i know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—i can’t help it—i enjoy every second of it.” he did. war was opportunity. he didn’t think the lights were going out all over europe, he thought the lights were about to shine and yet. what a warm and splendid book mr. roberts’s biography is. it is intelligent and fluid; he doesn’t lard things up to show you the depth of his research, but tells you what is important, with verve and sympathy. as you read you trust his judgment. it reminds me what a moving life churchill’s was, and what a struggle. his father, who treated him as an afterthought, did not live long enough to admire him; his mother became fully invested in him only once she understood he was a winner and would reflect well on her. his response to their neglect was a love that looks very much like gallantry. mr. roberts gives fresh attention to the meaning and origin of churchill’s domestic policies, which were central to his political