Churchill.(Book Review)

CHURCHILL by John Keegan Phoenix paperback, 2003

That very good military historian, John Keegan, has written a short book on the life and career of Winston Churchill which is to be thoroughly recommended to all. There has been a continuous stream of books on Churchill, Hitler and Stalin, and about World War II: a stream that shows no sign of slackening. And now that our pacifist media has discovered an hypnotic interest in war and group violence, every war and every incident of martial mayhem since the Fall is being exhumed, videoed and almost drooled upon. Strange that the new classes, while adamantly refusing to teach the young any valid or authentic history over a wide range of human ideas and endeavour, should have no taboos about military history--its great butcheries and its cast of heroes and anti-heroes. Obviously it all sells ... so everything is forgiven.

Keegan begins by recalling how, as a young man educated after the War, he shared the patronizing--even deprecating--view of Churchill, held by the cognoscenti of his generation. Why had there been all the fuss about this man who now appeared--more and more--old, sick and querulous, lacking all the charisma of which Keegan's parents' generation had spoken? Then, in 1957, in a New York apartment lent him by a friend, he discovered among the record collection an anachronistic item: the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill.

Keegan was riveted by the superb oratory, the seemingly total mastery of the English language, the absolute candour and realism about the course of events, and how the struggle was going to be long and bitter, with defeats and setbacks on the way. But ... Britain would survive and triumph. The Nazis and Hitler, for all their great power, would be defeated and made to disappear from the face of the earth. And liberty would be restored to all suffering under the Nazi heel: a pugnacious, grim, hubristic appeal to the patriotism, courage and sheer faith of his countrymen. This appeal fell on willing ears; and the rest is history.

If it was Britain's finest hour (and doubtless it was), so was it Churchill's. Keegan became an admirer of Churchill for life. As did so many of us,…