Last of the whigs: Churchill as historian.(Winston Churchill)

"Very seldom have great statesmen and warriors also been great writers. One thinks of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and even Napoleon, whose letters to Josephine during the first Italian campaign certainly have passion and splendor" So began the presentation speech awarding the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature to Winston Churchill. Churchill was the great leader of the twentieth century--but was he a great writer? It is not as generally accepted as winning the Nobel--writing's biggest prize--might indicate. The presenter's penultimate line, "A literary prize is intended to cast luster over the author, but here it is the author who gives luster to the prize" implies that Churchill was awarded the prize not for his literary achievement but because he led the West out of darkness in 1940 and happened to write a large number of history books. As with Dr. Johnson's women preachers, the interest is not in how well he did it but that he did it at all.

Historians used to rank among the literary splendors of English literature-Macaulay, Grote, Carlyle, Adams, James Mill, Oman, Motley--and the best historians were exceptionally popular. The Nobel is a twentieth-century prize, though, and the only other historian to win it was Theodor Mommsen in 1902, in the very first years of the prize, for his books about ancient Rome. Mommsen and Churchill both believed that scholarship should be wedded to political awareness: that historical writing reaches its apogee when scholarship informs and influences a wide audience. Today, the historian aims not for literary artistry but for scientific accuracy and has ceded any popular audience to journalists. That Churchill's books have survived this onslaught and remain in print is a testament to the abiding interest his life inspires. The reader who picks them up, though, will be rewarded with historical writing of the highest order: beautiful, informed, and insistent. Churchill understood the important truths of human association.

He was the last of the great Whig historians. He believed that the history of England was that of the ceaseless advance of individual liberty. Englishmen fought for it on their own land, and they fought in foreign lands to preserve and spread it. Churchill's histories of the World Wars make them part of a continuum: liberal democracy was the engine that defeated Louis XIV and Napoleon, and, in Churchill's direct experience, it defeated Wilhelm II and Hitler. As a historian, Churchill represents exactly what Herbert Butterfield was decrying in his 1931 "Whig Interpretation of History": "the study of the past with one eye, so to speak, on the present" Churchill was a politician and was less interested in studying events than in arranging them. His writings were part of a larger campaign to move his political career forward (and to earn a living, as Members of Parliament were not yet paid when he won his first seat in 1900). He was also immensely prolific, writing more than thirty books, countless speeches, and enough journalism for his Collected Works to reach thirty-eight volumes and 19,000 pages.

Churchill understood the innate power of words to move when they are coupled to fundamental beliefs. The past was a palpable presence to him from a young age. He was born at Blenheim, built by Wren and Vanbrugh to commemorate one of the nation's greatest soldiers, the Duke of Marlborough. His father was one of the chief parliamentarians of his generation--his every utterance reported verbatim in the press--and the family moved amongst the ruling castes of England. (On holiday from Harrow, Churchill met three future prime ministers in his parents' house: Rosebery, Balfour, and Asquith.) A sense of England's grandeur and mission surrounded him: from the Viceroys Palace in Phoenix Park in Dublin and St. James in London to his schooldays at Harrow and Sandhurst. Churchill began to write because he sought recognition. In 1895, as a young lieutenant in the 4th Hussars, he employed his long vacation to visit the war in Cuba--where 200,000 Spanish troops were failing to suppress the Cuban drive for independence--and get a taste of life under fire. He also got his first freelance fees, for five articles on "The Insurrection in Cuba" in the Daily Graphic. Posted to India, he discovered that he didn't know very much about the world and that army officers had lots of free time. Through the heat of the day, when most of his fellow subalterns slept, Churchill read: Gibbon, Macaulay, Lecky, Winwood Reade, Hallam, and the records of parliamentary speeches and debates. He also itched after advancement and knew how unlikely it was that he would receive any notice without a war. He saw ...