June 23, 2013

Finest Hour 137, Winter 2007-08

Page 52

The Perfect Churchill Primer

By David Freeman

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Profesor Freeman teaches history at California State University Fullerton.

Very Interesting People: Winston Churchill, by Paul Addison. Oxford University Press, 144 pp. softbound, $9.99. Not available from CBC.

Published as part of an Oxford series called “Very Interesting People” (VIP), this small book and its companions are offprints drawn from the 2004 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. The entry for Churchill, written by Churchill Centre Academic Adviser Paul Addison of the University of Edinburgh, naturally was one of the longest in the new DNB—so long in fact that Professor Addison suggested to Oxford University Press that he expand the entry into a full-length biography. The result was Churchill: The Unexpected Hero, published in 2005, one of the finest brief biographies in print (FH 127).

This splendid little volume, containing the original essay, may thus be described as the perfect Churchill primer. Addison has also used this new opportunity to correct some small errors in the text and, in my opinion, there exists no finer concise biography.

Addison gets through all the major facts and episodes in Churchill’s oft-told life with a fresh and thoughtful narrative style that reveals the author’s deep knowledge of the vast literature about his subject. Major controversies and long-standing legends are quickly set straight by the author’s mastery of facts and references to supporting texts and documents. All of this learning reflects the product both of Addison’s previous books, Churchill on the Home Front (1992) and The Road to 1945 (1975), and his decade of service as Director of the Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars in Edinburgh.

Inevitably, the book contains several familiar quotations, but the author also turns up less well-known but highly telling ones. The best may be one drawn from the diary of Alexander MacCallum Scott, Churchill’s first biographer and a Liberal MR Leaving a darkened House of Commons one night during the First World War, Churchill remarked, “This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success and for lack of this Germany’s brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster. This little room is the shrine of the world’s liberties.” And so it proved. Readers of this new book enjoy a confident sense that they have been guided through the basics of Churchill’s life by a learned master whom they can trust. This past autumn I used the book both as an assigned text for undergraduate students majoring in history and as an introduction for high-school teachers attending a seminar sponsored by the Churchill Centre. Oxford is to be commended for producing this useful and inexpensive volume.