World’s Greatest Statesman

Edward Luttwak

• Churchill: The End of Glory by John Charmley
  Hodder, 648 pp, £30.00, January 1993, ISBN 0 340 48795 X
• Churchill: A Major New Assessment of his Life in Peace and War edited by Robert Blake and Wm Roger Louis
  Oxford, 517 pp, £19.95, February 1993, ISBN 0 19 820317 9

The highly practical Hellenistic solution to Britain’s insatiable Churchill/Finest Hour cravings would have been to establish a regular cult, with its own dedicated priests, rituals and sanctuaries. Facing a brazen engraving of the famously pugnacious 1941 Karsh photograph, surrounded by appropriate symbols or even original relics of Spitfires, Sten guns, Home Guard pikes and Montecristo cigars, listening to quadrophonic recordings of the major speeches in His own voice, peering into side-chapels dedicated to His companions (Beaverbrook, Birkenhead, Bracken), the average gent thrown into despair by the latest debacle of the British economy could swiftly revive his flagging spirits. Then on his way out of the shrine he could perhaps pause to purchase a Churchill amulet from one of the attending priests robed in 1940-style battle dress, with tin helmet and gas-mask satchel.