Winston Churchill was querulous, childish, self-indulgent, and difficult, writes English historian Roy Jenkins. But he was also brilliant, tenacious, and capable--in short, "the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street." Jenkins's book stands as the best single-volume biography of Churchill in recent years.

Marked by the author's wide experience writing on British leaders such as Balfour and Gladstone and his tenure as a member of Parliament, his book adds much to the vast library of works on Churchill. While acknowledging his subject's prickly nature, Jenkins credits Churchill for, among other things, recognizing far earlier than his peers the dangers of Hitler's regime. He praises Churchill for his leadership during the war years, especially at the outset, when England stood alone and in imminent danger of defeat. He also examines Churchill's struggle to forge political consensus to meet that desperate crisis, and he sheds new light on Churchill's postwar decline. --Gregory McNamee


From Publishers Weekly
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Gladstone (1997), Jenkins offers a bloated yet idiosyncratic and accessible life of England's greatest modern prime minister. Jenkins's wry wit and judgments of great men, untainted by awe, partly offset the fact that, as he admits, he has few new facts to add to an already exhaustively recorded life. Jenkins has a propensity for unnecessary French and curious adverbs (unfriendlily), adjectives (spistolatory) and nouns (peripherist) and is at his best exploring Churchill's three out-of-office "wilderness" periods and his writing jobs (requiring a staff of loyal, ill-paid researchers and secretaries to take his clangorous dictation), which helped support his expensive lifestyle. ("I lived in fact from mouth to hand," Churchill confessed.) But as the statesman's many decades wind down, the biographer himself seems to tire, resorting to a litany of itineraries. American audiences may be drawn to Jenkins's revisionist views of Churchill's relationships with Roosevelt, with whom he sees "more a partnership of circumstance and convenience than a friendship of individuals," and with Eisenhower, a "political general" who was "always a little cold for Churchill's taste, with the famous smile barely skin-deep." Jenkins is hard on Churchill for being soft on alleged mountebanks like Lord Beaverbrook. He dwells only briefly on Churchill's family affairs, aside from expressing skepticism about his reputedly warm marriage to Clementine; she often advised her husband wisely, but "managed to be absent at nearly all the most important moments of Churchill's life." Jenkins's judgments and the fact that he has boiled this eventful life down to a single volume will attract many readers to this entertaining, though often exasperating study. 32 pages of photos and maps not seen by PW. (Nov.)Forecast: A main selection of both BOMC and the History Book Club, with a respected author, who will tour New York and Washington, D.C., and an iconic subject, the biography is guaranteed media attention and sales.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A British politician and author of over a dozen books, Jenkins (Gladstone) begins with an important question: given the extensive literature on Winston Churchill, is there anything left to add? Although Jenkins admits that he has not discovered any new factual information, this does not disqualify him from supplying useful insights into Churchill's career. As a veteran politician and administrator, Jenkins is well placed to evaluate Churchill's strengths and weaknesses as a cabinet-level official. For example, Jenkins asserts that Churchill's micro-management at the admiralty during the early months of World War I contributed to disaster, while his leadership at the Ministry of Munitions near the end of the war helped maintain a high level of production. Jenkins's coverage of World War II eschews facile generalizations and provides a detailed picture of Churchill's role as wartime leader, in particular his ability to hold things together during the period of 1940-41, when less confident men would have given up. Churchill fans will enjoy reading this book, while academics will likely stick to Norman Rose's Winston Churchill: The Unruly Giant (LJ 6/15/95). Recommended for larger libraries. Fred Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
From his early days in the British military in the late nineteenth century to his compelling role in global politics during both World Wars, Winston Churchill was a master at self-promotion and political intrigue. Written by one of his later contemporaries, this exhaustively researched biography covers the minutiae of the statesman's life in excruciating detail. Robert Whitfield survives the 39 hours necessary to commit the tome to tape, courageously soldiering through the dusty text. He offers a few characterizations, namely in East Indian and French dialects, and performs a credible imitation of Churchill as heard in his later recorded speeches. This portrayal, however, changes not a whit from Churchill's teens until his death. R.P.L. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
It is a great historical irony that a man whose political views and outlook on the human condition were so characteristic of the nineteenth century is regarded by many as the greatest man of the twentieth. Jenkins, who served for many years as a distinguished Member of Parliament and cabinet secretary, is also the author of 18 books, including a widely praised biography of Gladstone. His stirring biography of Churchill cannot, nor is it meant to, supplant the more comprehensive and definitive biography by Martin Gilbert. Jenkins pays scant attention to Churchill's relations with his parents and his unhappy childhood. He does not uncover any sensational new facts that provide the "key" to understanding this frustratingly complicated man. Instead, he concentrates on analyzing Churchill's evolution as a political animal; within those confines this work is a mighty accomplishment. Jenkins illustrates eloquently how Churchill, perhaps to serve his insatiable ambition, learned to play the game of democratic electoral politics, despite his own aristocratic inclinations. Jenkins acknowledges Churchill's stubbornness, often-destructive vanity, and tunnel vision on certain issues. Yet, Jenkins convincingly asserts, he was right far more often than he was wrong; and on the life-or-death threats posed by Nazism and then Communism, he was right sooner and in a more profound sense than any contemporary statesman. For that, the world will be forever in his debt. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book World
Roy Jenkins's Churchill is thorough and straightforward, overlong but authoritative.


Bookviews, February 2003
Jenkins combines an unparalleled command of British political history and his own high-level government experience in an excellent narrative...


Review
"One might wonder whether anything fresh remains to be said about Winston Churchill; but Roy Jenkins uniquely combines the skills of a master biographer with the insights of a practical politician and draws a fresh portrait of the great Englishman with authority, elegance and wit. This is far and away Churchill's best one-volume biography."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"Roy Jenkins is a premier historian in our time. Thus, his wonderful work on Gladstone and, especially for Americans, his greatly engaging account of the life of Harry Truman and his wholly unexpected achievements. And much else and now Churchill. No public figure has been so amply and (by himself) so devoutly covered as Churchill. And none more in need of the amplification, revision and correction here offered. That this should be done by a writer and international public citizen who is also a talented political leader and a university chancellor is truly a gift of our time."—John Kenneth Galbraith

"[A] beautifully written book . . . [If it] has no fresh evidence or interpretation, it has something more valuable in a biography--an instinctive feel for the subject . . . Politics and history were at the centre of [Churchill's] concerns for the best part of a century; the same is almost true of Lord Jenkins . . . Jenkins comes closer than any of the previous . . . biographers to capturing the essence of Churchill . . . Political experience at the highest levels qualifies Jenkins to write a magisterial biography peppered with useful insights, but this is not the only quality that makes it worth reading. Age provides a perspective. Jenkins is particularly good at spotting the element of urgency in Churchill's early career . . . [I]n 1940 events transmuted Churchill's defects into gold . . . In 1940, he was the essential man . . . Lord Jenkins ... is a great believer in rankings, so it would be appropriate to finish by awarding this biography an alpha-straight or minus . . . Macaulay himself could not have done a better job."—John Charmley, The Guardian (UK)

"Like his subject, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead is an outstanding biographer, autobiographer and journalist . . . Liveliness and wit are common to both men, but Jenkins has a subtle irony, often at his own expense, which is not much in Churchill's style. To have written this book at all in a little over two years must be judged an astonishing tour de force. Though Jenkins completed his eighth decade before completing it, it does not read as the work of an old man; it has the narrative power, sweep and sparkle of the author in his prime. Inside knowledge of politics is everywhere in evidence and the book is full of intriguing allusions to history before and after the Churchillian period . . . The tone is . . . warmly admiring and sympathetic but definitely not hagiographic."—John Grigg, The Times (London)

"What new light can Jenkins's biography of Churchill shed on a subject that might already seem overresearched, overwritten and overpublished? The answer does not lie in the evidence as such . . . What is superior about this biography is the insight it brings to the sources . . . [Jenkins'] probing ruminations . . . are erudite, subtle and revealing. He has a gift for posing fruitfully unexpected questions, often displaying a degree of empathy with his subject bred by common experience . . . The imperatives of party politics and political manoeuvre are always remembered and deftly brought out . . . The distinctive second string to Jenkins' bow is . . . his ability to span the worlds of politics and literature like no other significant British politician since Churchill himself."—Peter Clarke, The Sunday Times (London)

"[A] first-class, well-sustained work of history and a masterpiece of biography . . . almost every single one of these 912 pages boasts a sagacious judgement or a fine epithet . . . as much a work of literature as of history . . . The 12 chapters on the Second World War occupy less than a quarter of the book, but could easily be published on their own. Jenkins makes the military issues easily intelligible, with good phraseology and vivid imagery . . . To have written this splendid book at the age of 80 in only a little over two years is a simply astonishing achievement . . . the greatest political story of the 20th century is presented in a more elegant, engaging and consistently fair way than ever before. Of all the very many biographies of Winston Churchill that have been written, this one is the best."—Andrew Roberts, Sunday Telegraph (London)

"Jenkins ... is at his inimitable best on Churchill's relations with the vast variety of people he had to live and work with ... rich in agreeable stories and digressions."—Geoffrey Best, The Evening Standard (London)

"[M]agnificent ... Jenkins ... a creature of the system that nurtured Palmerston and Disraeli, Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George ... now nearly 81, is utterly at home in a landscape that other biographers might find intimidating, even incomprehensible ... The book's enduring strength lies in the breadth of its sympathy ... Churchill is a life brilliantly reflected in the mirror of its author's personality and experience. Having warned his readers of his conviction that 'great men have strong elements of comicality in them', he presents his subject - part self-centered celebrity, part workaholic journalist, part political chatterbox - as both a character obsessed, even maddened, by the sense of his own destiny, and also as a writer-orator who would sacrifice almost anything for an eye-catching phrase or a crowd-pleasing period ... Jenkins's effortless selection of the choicest timber from acres of historiographical forest gives his portrait great freshness and originality ... The year 1937, in other respects, is a low point for Churchill. Out of office, in trouble with his constituency, visibly ageing ...and deeply at odds with ... public opinion, he seemed to be what in fact he had become, ...a has-been. And yet, within two years, by the most extraordinary chain of events, he had emerged to lead his country through its battle with Nazism and himself to his rendezvous with destiny ... Jenkins gets the balance of the Second World War just right ... By the time Jenkins writes 'finis' to this astounding performance, he has triumphantly vindicated his closing verdict that Churchill was the 'greatest Prime Minister of the twentieth century ... This is the biography of the year."—Robert McCrum, The Observer

"This is a splendid addition to Churchillian lore, a chronicle chock-full of revealing personal anecdotes, delightful wartime vignettes and fascinating new insights into the critical 1939-45 years. . . . Jenkins skillfully pulls together the varied strands of Churchill's career, giving us a sweeping and penetrating portrait."—Paul Duke, The Baltimore Sun

"Churchill is such a protean personality that his life still yields wonders on every page . . . hugely entertaining and instructive."—John Campbell, The Independent Weekend Review

"Jenkins gives a gripping account of the Crisis Cabinet meetings of May 1940 . . . There are moments when Jenkins makes Churchill sound almost contemporary, claiming that he had 'the gift of communicable emotion' (more Clinton than Bush). But overall the book shows that even in the Forties Churchill was a throwback to an earlier age."—Mick Hume, Play

"A rich, wonderful and compulsively readable book . . . [a] marvellous study."—Ben Pimlott, Financial Times

"Not much room for doubt about which is the political biography of the year-Roy Jenkins's Churchill carried all before it."—Anthony Howard

"I'm halfway through Roy Jenkins's Churchill—even better than his Asquith."—Peter Hall, The Observer Review, "Books of the Year"

"My most enjoyable literary experience of 2001 was the 10 days or so I spent in the company of Roy Jenkins's Churchill—a biographical dream-ticket if there ever was one. It combines academic authority with some very good jokes, first-hand political experience with a sympathetic imagination, and grand strategy with intimate domestic detail. I also, as a general principle, warmly approve of writers who produce their best books at the age of 80, on the grounds that they provide hope for the rest of us."—Robert Harris, The Observer Review, "Books of the Year"



Book Description
In Churchill, Roy Jenkins provides a comprehensive portrait of Winston Churchill from his childhood to the critical World War II period and beyond in a single, definitive volume. Roy Jenkins combines unparalleled command of British political history and his own high level government experience in a narrative account of Churchill's astounding career that is unmatched in its shrewd insights, its unforgettable anecdotes, the clarity of its overarching themes, and the author's nuanced appreciation of his extraordinary subject.

Exceptional in its breadth of knowledge and distinguished in its stylish wit and penetrating intelligence, Churchill is one of the finest political biographies of our time.


About the Author
Roy Jenkins is the author of 18 books, including Gladstone (1997), which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Active in British politics for half a century, he entered the House of Commons in 1948 and subsequently served as Minister of Aviation, Home Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer; he has also been the President of the European Commission and Chancellor of Oxford University. In 1987 he took his seat in the House of Lords

FROM OUR EDITORS

Winston Churchill became a historical icon by virtue of his strength and courage as Great Britain's leader during World War II. From childhood, he prepared himself for the day when he would play a dynamic role in his nation's history. How did he achieve that amazing goal? Eminent British historian Roy Jenkins has written a marvelous biography of the man who most famously said, "Never, never, never, never give up."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Winston Churchill is an icon of modern history, but even though he was at the forefront of the political scene for almost sixty years, he might be remembered only as a minor player in the drama of British government had it not been for World War II. In this magisterial book, Roy Jenkins's command of the political history of Britain and his own high-level government experience combine in a narrative account of Churchill's astounding career that is unmatched in its shrewd insights, its unforgettable anecdotes, the clarity of its overarching themes, and the author's nuanced appreciation of his extraordinary subject.

SYNOPSIS

This biography takes the perspective that Churchill always believed he was destined for greatness, and thus, throughout his life, positioned himself in his careers, writing and politics, and in his proximity to the most important people and events in British governmental life to assure he would be prepared for the moment he would be in charge. Jenkins, who has published 18 books and is currently President of the Royal Society of Literature, incorporates many humorous anecdotal moments in his evaluation of this oft heralded political giant.

Annotation © Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Stanley Weintraub - Los Angeles Times

Roy Jenkins's quirky but mostly admiring life of Winston Churchill serves up the vanity with the glory, and the fudge with the facts.

Book World

Roy Jenkins's Churchill is thorough and straightforward, overlong but authoritative.

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Gladstone (1997), Jenkins offers a bloated yet idiosyncratic and accessible life of England's greatest modern prime minister. Jenkins's wry wit and judgments of great men, untainted by awe, partly offset the fact that, as he admits, he has few new facts to add to an already exhaustively recorded life. Jenkins has a propensity for unnecessary French and curious adverbs (unfriendlily), adjectives (spistolatory) and nouns (peripherist) and is at his best exploring Churchill's three out-of-office "wilderness" periods and his writing jobs (requiring a staff of loyal, ill-paid researchers and secretaries to take his clangorous dictation), which helped support his expensive lifestyle. ("I lived in fact from mouth to hand," Churchill confessed.) But as the statesman's many decades wind down, the biographer himself seems to tire, resorting to a litany of itineraries. American audiences may be drawn to Jenkins's revisionist views of Churchill's relationships with Roosevelt, with whom he sees "more a partnership of circumstance and convenience than a friendship of individuals," and with Eisenhower, a "political general" who was "always a little cold for Churchill's taste, with the famous smile barely skin-deep." Jenkins is hard on Churchill for being soft on alleged mountebanks like Lord Beaverbrook. He dwells only briefly on Churchill's family affairs, aside from expressing skepticism about his reputedly warm marriage to Clementine; she often advised her husband wisely, but "managed to be absent at nearly all the most important moments of Churchill's life." Jenkins's judgments and the fact that he has boiled this eventful life down to a single volume will attractmany readers to this entertaining, though often exasperating study. 32 pages of photos and maps not seen by PW. (Nov.) Forecast: A main selection of both BOMC and the History Book Club, with a respected author, who will tour New York and Washington, D.C., and an iconic subject, the biography is guaranteed media attention and sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A British politician and author of over a dozen books, Jenkins (Gladstone) begins with an important question: given the extensive literature on Winston Churchill, is there anything left to add? Although Jenkins admits that he has not discovered any new factual information, this does not disqualify him from supplying useful insights into Churchill's career. As a veteran politician and administrator, Jenkins is well placed to evaluate Churchill's strengths and weaknesses as a cabinet-level official. For example, Jenkins asserts that Churchill's micro-management at the admiralty during the early months of World War I contributed to disaster, while his leadership at the Ministry of Munitions near the end of the war helped maintain a high level of production. Jenkins's coverage of World War II eschews facile generalizations and provides a detailed picture of Churchill's role as wartime leader, in particular his ability to hold things together during the period of 1940-41, when less confident men would have given up. Churchill fans will enjoy reading this book, while academics will likely stick to Norman Rose's Winston Churchill: The Unruly Giant (LJ 6/15/95). Recommended for larger libraries. Fred Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A thoughtful, comprehensive portrait of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's remarkable life. Lord Jenkins (Gladstone, 1997, etc.) adds to his reputation as England's foremost political biographer with this portrayal of Churchill's mercurial character and career. He carefully avoids the hero worship or demonization affected by many historians in favor of a balanced assessment of Churchill's work in literature and politics. The perennial statesman's authorial aspirations, Jenkins asserts, in addition to eventually winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature, also laid the rhetorical foundation for many of the last century's most memorable speeches. At the same time, his genius for oratory assured Churchill political positions in which he would have a profound impact on Great Britain's foreign and domestic policies. These twin ambitions, Jenkins argues, prepared Churchill for and eventually catapulted him into his most famous role as Britain's wartime prime minister after Neville Chamberlain's notorious appeasement of Adolf Hitler. In the aftermath of WWII, Churchill fell from power along with Britain's need for such a larger-than-life leader. The author devotes substantial space to Churchill's selfish attempts to hold onto the international prestige he had earned as England's wartime leader. His evenhanded analysis demonstrates the damage Churchill's political ambition wreaked on both his party and his own reputation. Even in light of Jenkins's inclusion of the politician's almost childlike idiosyncrasies, Churchill's infectious exuberance and tenacious spirit shine through, insuring that his legacy remains that of Britain's most impressive modern leader. While too many authors havechronicled Churchill's rich life for this to be considered truly definitive, Jenkins's inside perspective on British politics makes his work essential reading for those interested in Churchill's life and times. (32 pages b&w photos, maps) Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club main selection

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