Churchill: A Biography (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "CHURCHILL'S PROVENANCE WAS aristocratic, indeed ducal, and some have seen this as the most important key to his whole career..." (more)
Key Phrases: second premiership, naval estimates, doubtful provenance, Lloyd George, House of Commons, Winston Churchill (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Winston Churchill was querulous, childish, self-indulgent, and difficult, writes English historian Roy Jenkins. But he was also brilliant, tenacious, and capable--in short, "the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street." Jenkins's book stands as the best single-volume biography of Churchill in recent years.

Marked by the author's wide experience writing on British leaders such as Balfour and Gladstone and his tenure as a member of Parliament, his book adds much to the vast library of works on Churchill. While acknowledging his subject's prickly nature, Jenkins credits Churchill for, among other things, recognizing far earlier than his peers the dangers of Hitler's regime. He praises Churchill for his leadership during the war years, especially at the outset, when England stood alone and in imminent danger of defeat. He also examines Churchill's struggle to forge political consensus to meet that desperate crisis, and he sheds new light on Churchill's postwar decline. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Gladstone (1997), Jenkins offers a bloated yet idiosyncratic and accessible life of England's greatest modern prime minister. Jenkins's wry wit and judgments of great men, untainted by awe, partly offset the fact that, as he admits, he has few new facts to add to an already exhaustively recorded life. Jenkins has a propensity for unnecessary French and curious adverbs (unfriendlily), adjectives (spistolatory) and nouns (peripherist) and is at his best exploring Churchill's three out-of-office "wilderness" periods and his writing jobs (requiring a staff of loyal, ill-paid researchers and secretaries to take his clangorous dictation), which helped support his expensive lifestyle. ("I lived in fact from mouth to hand," Churchill confessed.) But as the statesman's many decades wind down, the biographer himself seems to tire, resorting to a litany of itineraries. American audiences may be drawn to Jenkins's revisionist views of Churchill's relationships with Roosevelt, with whom he sees "more a partnership of circumstance and convenience than a friendship of individuals," and with Eisenhower, a "political general" who was "always a little cold for Churchill's taste, with the famous smile barely skin-deep." Jenkins is hard on Churchill for being soft on alleged mountebanks like Lord Beaverbrook. He dwells only briefly on Churchill's family affairs, aside from expressing skepticism about his reputedly warm marriage to Clementine; she often advised her husband wisely, but "managed to be absent at nearly all the most important moments of Churchill's life." Jenkins's judgments and the fact that he has boiled this eventful life down to a single volume will attract many readers to this entertaining, though often exasperating study. 32 pages of photos and maps not seen by PW. (Nov.)Forecast: A main selection of both BOMC and the History Book Club, with a respected author, who will tour New York and Washington, D.C., and an iconic subject, the biography is guaranteed media attention and sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1002 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (November 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374123543
• ISBN-13: 978-0374123543
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #429,659 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Matter Of Style, April 24, 2002

By	taking a rest - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Prior to the appearance of this biography, by Whitbread Award winning author Roy Jenkins, the only single volume work that I would have recommended to people would have been Sir Martin Gilbert's one volume biography. Gilbert has spent the better part of his life creating the definitive biography originally started by Churchill's son Randolph, and he continues to add 1,000 page companion volumes of documents that supplement the massive primary work.

If a reader were to select this work by Jenkins they would not gain a complete insight into the legendary figure that Sir Winston Spencer Churchill is. That a new biography approaching 1,000 pages made the NYT Bestseller's List is a testimony to Churchill's place in history. I doubt there is a politician that is more quoted than Sir Winston. The primary differences between the two books I mention are of style and completeness. Martin Gilbert in an accomplished historian, while Mr. Jenkins writes from a perspective of a man who sat in the House of Commons, witnessed Churchill in action, and documents his life primarily as a politician. There are formative episodes that are not included at all, which in the end prevents this very fine work from being a well-rounded documentary. A young Churchill spent time in Ireland, but this was never mentioned. The downfall of his father was much more complicated than the space allotted in this work, and his mother too is not represented enough.

The book also lacks extended time with the Churchill who was an amazing raconteur at dining tables from a very young age. Many of the great quotes from Churchill are not in this book, and many others are given short shrift. Mr. Jenkins style also takes a bit more effort than many may choose to expend. William F. Buckley Jr. could certainly breeze through some of the extremely arcane English that is used, but most would be well advised to have a dictionary handy. The author is also given to liberal uses of the French Language, often illustrating how Churchill's poor French was easily misinterpreted. A foreign language that is not footnoted or translated in place is presumptuous and harmful to a work, expecting readers to not only be fluent but competent enough to manage error prone French is just a bad way to present a book.

This is really a memoir of Churchill as remembered by Mr. Jenkins, and, as such it is a worthwhile read. For anyone starting out on his or her education on Churchill this is most certainly not the place to start. The official biography of Gilbert's is the best, but the multiple volumes, 10,000+ page works is much more than most would wish to tackle. The work is very readable; so if you are inclined do not hesitate. Sir Martin Gilbert's single volume work remains the standard, and William Manchester has produced two of what was to be a three-volume work. His health has prevented its completion, but his two completed volumes are excellent on their own.

There are dozens of single volume works on Churchill that have a narrower focus and better serve the reader. This book is very worthwhile for those who are great admirers of Churchill and have read many, or perhaps dozens of others. As a stand-alone work it does not give enough information and the style can lack clarity. Eventually worth a read, but should not be at or near the top of a reading list on Churchill.

93 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost purely a political biography, January 7, 2002

By	Belize Traveller (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

What most reviews don't tell you is that Roy Jenkins, himself a politician, has created an almost purely political biography of Churchill. Even more narrowly, it is a focused on the House of Commons and Churchill's role in it over a span of some 50 years.
In more than 900 pages, Jenkins barely touches on Churchill's personal life, his relationship with "Clemmie," his children or with anyone outside the closeted world of British politics. The little details of daily life, which provide density and color -- what brand of cigars he smoked, what books he read for pleasure, what he ate for breakfast -- are almost entirely missing.

A greater fault, in my view, is that Jenkins fails to adequately explore and explain Churchill's place in the decline and fall of the British Empire, which took place in great part during Churchill's watches. This is a story, as Jenkins tells it, mostly of the Old Boy's club, of Asquith and Lloyd George and Chamberlain and all the rest. Reading Jenkins, you would hardly know that during the course of Churchill's life one of the world's greatest powers and greatest empires became an also ran on the world's stage.

Granted, Jenkins is a masterful writer with a great grasp of the politics of 20th century Britain. If politics, in great detail, is all you demand of a biography, then Roy Jenkins' Churchill will suit you very adequately.

--Lan Sluder

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read it., April 27, 2002

By A Customer

Most of the reviewers of the book seem to be Churchill experts. The forget that the vast majority of the people who will read the book are Churchill-uninformed.
It is true that there are other extraordinary biographies, especially Gilbert's multivolume one. But for the uninitiated this one is among the best. The average reader will be fascinated by the life of the "Great Man" and will not even notice the small subtleites that the "experts" mention.
If you are interested in History, Biography, Leadership, Life, Greatness, then read this book. You will learn much, enjoy much and greatly enhance your knowledge of more than one topic.
Leave the minutiae for the connoisseurs (even if you want to be one, this is the place to start!).