On writing, something by which Churchill consistently made his living and for which he won prizes and acclaim, Roberts is on less sure ground. But this precision can only do so much in service of revealing biography. Roberts enjoys the small detail as well as the grand narrative and this willingness near-constantly to provide the times, dates and exact locations of events, not merely who was present and what was said, gives the book pleasing precision. He takes readers into innumerable meetings where the future of the free world was not only under discussion but under mortal threat. Roberts makes good use of the official documentation and unofficial accounts that record the events in those years. Hundreds of pages are required to discuss with any seriousness the complexity and hardness of the war’s middle period, and of Churchill’s task in those lean and dangerous years. Roberts dedicates much to Churchill’s wartime leadership – and this is right and necessary. The same goes for his travelling the globe in his youth, seeking glory and fame and putting himself in danger.Ĭhurchill aged 19, on leaving Royal Military College, Sandhurst, as a second lieutenant Hulton Archive / Getty Churchill’s family and upbringing not only shaped his character, but set the stage upon which his life and its dramas would be played.

Little of Churchill’s titanic life remains unexamined. As biography and as history, this legwork pays off. Roberts has left little to chance virtually nothing of all the libraries of writing dedicated to Churchill escapes his notice.

This mental preparation is supplemented by the actual. Roberts also authored Eminent Churchillians, an exercise in profiling an age, dominated and united by the personage and image of Churchill. Roberts's first foray into history was a biography of Lord Halifax, Britain's foreign secretary at the outbreak of the Second World War and a candidate, alongside Churchill, to succeed Neville Chamberlain in 1940. With Churchill, one cannot escape the feeling that Roberts has had this book in preparation, or at least in mind, for a long time. His biography of Napoleon captured and advocated for the French emperor in a new and persuasive way. Hundreds have tried to navigate one of the modern world’s fullest lives and most famous wartime figures.Īndrew Roberts is not unused to producing large books about monumental lives. How can a writer address a life such as Winston Churchill’s – a life so full of incident and happening, a life of early fame, deep failure, and finally international apotheosis?

Winston churchill walking with destiny