Bernard Porter lives in Hull and in Stockholm. His last book was Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World.
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Vol. 24 No. 2 · 14 January 2002
pages 15-16 | 3015 words
Over Several Tops
Bernard Porter
- Churchill: A Study in Greatness by Geoffrey Best
Hambledon, 370 pp, £19.95, May 2001, ISBN 1 85285 253 4
- Churchill by Roy Jenkins
Macmillan, 1002 pp, £30.00, October 2001, ISBN 0 333 78290 9
Why two more Churchill biographies? Geoffrey Best reckons there are fifty or a hundred out there already. Two good reasons to want to add to them would be the unearthing of new evidence or a radically different interpretation. Roy Jenkins says he is not ‘a great partisan of the “revelatory” biography’, and claims that for Churchill nearly all the ‘facts’ are known in any case. One of Best’s motives for writing his book is to scotch some of the wilder recent interpretations he believes have obscured an older and safer wisdom. Neither author professes originality. So why did they bother adding to the list?
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 4 · 21 February 2002
From Richard Boston
Bernard Porter says that Churchill believed he should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize rather than the Literature one, and that, not being able to attend the ceremony, he wrote a letter to the Nobel Prize committee with a barbed comment about Sweden's neutrality (LRB, 24 January). Unlikely. Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, the Peace Prize is administered by Norway.
Richard Boston
Aldworth, Berkshire
Vol. 24 No. 5 · 7 March 2002
From Bernard Porter
Richard Boston (Letters, 21 February) must have misunderstood what I wrote about Churchill. I suggested that he would have preferred the Nobel Peace Prize to the Literature Prize he was awarded in 1953. I also asked whether the admiration for Sweden's 'warriors' he expressed in his letter to the Swedish Nobel Committee (apologising for not being able to collect the Literature Prize personally) might have been a sly dig at Sweden's neutrality. For the life of me I can't see how the fact that the Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian Committee, which of course I knew, makes that 'unlikely'. It has absolutely no bearing on it.
Bernard Porter
Hull
