Early Hillhead Man

Paul Addison

• Churchill’s Political Philosophy by Martin Gilbert
  Oxford, 119 pp, £8.00, November 1981, ISBN 0 19 726005 5
• Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years by Martin Gilbert
  Macmillan, 279 pp, £8.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 333 32564 8
• Churchill and de Gaulle by François Kersaudy
  Collins, 476 pp, £12.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 00 216328 4
• The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart edited by Kenneth Young
  Macmillan, 800 pp, £30.00, October 1981, ISBN 0 333 18480 7
• Churchill’s Indian Summer by Anthony Seldon
  Hodder, 667 pp, £14.95, October 1981, ISBN 0 340 25456 4

Churchill, like Disraeli, turned his political struggles into a romance. To read his writings and speeches is to be invited into a special world of technicolor spendour, the stage for an epic with the author as hero. But ought we to suspend disbelief? A division of opinion has long existed between romantics, who feel themselves seduced and compelled by Churchill’s vision of events, and the sceptics who treat it as a fabrication. Until 1940 the sceptics outnumbered the romantics by about a hundred to one. Politicians and civil servants generally recognised a kind of erratic genius in Churchill, but his rhetoric was dismissed as the transparent disguise of an adventurer on the make. If he spoke of the future of Liberalism, it would be assumed that he was plotting with Lloyd George. If he condemned the state of British defences, it would be argued that he was trying to overthrow Baldwin.