The Lion is back

Over 400 read­ers asked when we would see the third and final vol­ume of William Manchester’s Churchill biog­ra­phy. The Last Lion: Win­ston Spencer Churchill, Defend­er of the Realm 1940-1965 was last sequeled in 1988. Answer: Ama­zon was ship­ping copies in 2012—only twen­ty-four years since Vol­ume II!

Mr. Reid kind­ly asked me to proof the man­u­script for Vol­ume III, as did Mr. Man­ches­ter for Vol­ume II.

This will be good news to the many Man­ches­ter fans who have wait­ed for years. Paul Reid’s vol­ume is writ­ten in the Man­ches­ter style, as dra­mat­ic and grip­ping as the first two vol­umes. Read com­ments below for more details.

From a review by Warren Kimball:

Reid’s nar­ra­tive skills are obvi­ous. At his best he is suc­cinct and enlight­en­ing. At his less than best, he ram­bles on about details that mat­ter lit­tle to the big pic­ture. Does nam­ing British reg­i­ments real­ly mat­ter? (The King’s this or the Queen’s that? Or, even sil­li­er, the 2nd Sher­wood Foresters or var­i­ous Hussars?)

Nazi reac­tions are exag­ger­at­ed. Josef Goebbels’ diary seems quot­ed almost as often as Churchill’s war mem­oirs. Bat­tle details are spelled out like case stud­ies at Sand­hurst or West Point. For the most part, this is a nar­ra­tive about the Sec­ond World War. Win­ston Churchill plays the lead role. And the war threat­ens to over­whelm the narrative.

Mar­tin Gilbert has already giv­en us a metic­u­lous, good-to-the-last-detail chronol­o­gy of Churchill dur­ing the Sec­ond World War (cit­ed less fre­quent­ly than I expect­ed). We have a sur­feit of broad sur­veys of the war viewed from the top. What does this book add?

Cruising down the river

Paul Reid has not writ­ten a biog­ra­phy, but rather an old-style “life & times” nar­ra­tive with guns and bul­lets, polit­i­cal con­niv­ing, oft-repeat­ed (but worth repeat­ing) anec­dotes, love­ly touch­es of the per­son­al, and the most impor­tant asset—a hero. It is a nice cruise down a rather lengthy riv­er that you’ve sailed before.

There is noth­ing new or excit­ing; it is reas­sur­ing rather than chal­leng­ing. Still, it is a love­ly and lit­er­ate view of famil­iar ter­ri­to­ry that mas­sages old sto­ries, nur­tures leg­ends, and points gen­tly to mis­cal­cu­la­tions and mis­takes of the hero—who flawed though he was, remains a hero.

Reid chose, or was forced, to pre­tend igno­rance of the dogged efforts of a mul­ti­tude of aca­d­e­mics who, in the last four decades, pushed for­ward the fron­tiers of schol­ar­ship and intel­lec­tu­al inquiry into the his­to­ry of the Sec­ond World War.

Not only is his his­tor­i­cal iso­la­tion­ism rude; it is a shame, par­tic­u­lar­ly since he is a superb writer. He makes a famil­iar his­to­ry come alive, though you’ll have to man­age a huge car­go of extra­ne­ous mate­r­i­al in a book this long (with strik­ing­ly nar­row mar­gins) that takes Churchill only from 1940 until his death.