Enjoying every moment

David Reynolds

• Churchill by John Keegan
  Weidenfeld, 181 pp, £14.99, November 2002, ISBN 0 297 60776 6
• Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945 by John Ramsden
  HarperCollins, 652 pp, £9.99, September 2003, ISBN 0 00 653099 0
• Clementine Churchill: The Revised and Updated Biography by Mary Soames
  Doubleday, 621 pp, £25.00, September 2002, ISBN 0 385 60446 7
• Churchill at War 1940-45 by Lord Moran
  Constable, 383 pp, £9.99, October 2002, ISBN 1 84119 608 8
• Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy by Klaus Larres
  Yale, 583 pp, £25.00, June 2002, ISBN 0 300 09438 8

In August 1940, Winston Churchill likened the relationship between Britain and America to the Mississippi: ‘It just keeps rolling along,’ he told the Commons, ‘full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant.’ In the car afterwards he sang ‘Ole Man River’ (out of tune) on the way back to Number Ten.

Sixty years later, one might say the same about Ole Man Churchill, whose reputation just keeps rolling along. The tide of books is unceasing – I could have added several more to those discussed here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time.