If a man is coming across the sea to kill you, you do everything in your power to make sure he dies before finishing his journey. That may be difficult, it may be painful, but at least it is simple. We are now entering a world of imponderables, and at every stage occasions for self-questioning arise. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
—Winston S. Churchill, 18 February 1945
It was recently asserted that Churchill doesn’t have much to say to us today, and that the only people who use Churchill as a guide nowadays are “over-testosteroned American neocons.”…
“Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate.” William Manchester’s inscription, quoting Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, a Churchill favorite, on my second volume of his Last Lion, reminds me that Bill was himself for many of us “Captain of the Gate”; and that his death in 2004 bid fair to deprive us of finale of the most lyrical Churchill work ever written.
Not quite. Twenty-four years on, Little Brown has published the third and final volume of this famous biography, subtitled Defender of the Realm 1940-1965 (1232 pages, in hardbound, Kindle and audio editions).…
