The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). The text includes photographs (not seen). Manchester closes on a triumphant note: the May 19, 1940, radio address in which Churchill enjoined the British to brace for battle and 'their finest hour.' An eloquent and evenhanded appreciation. On balance, of course, there were decidedly more credits than debits to his account during the gathering storm, and he became the moral equivalent of a consensus choice for Prime Minister after the onset of WW II. Nor can Churchill's relationships with his children-notably, Randolph and Sarah-be deemed much of a success. For instance, Churchill's preparedness campaign suffered a serious setback when -with more loyalty than judgment-he espoused the cause of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. But, while devoting detailed attention to where and how Churchill's contemporaries went wrong, Manchester does not overlook his subject's faults. With anguished memories of the nation's WW I losses, the ruling Conservatives made appeasement a keystone of British foreign policy. Until the eleventh hour, though, he was a prophet largely without honor in his own country-and party. Churchill spoke out forcefully in the House of Commons and wrote scores of articles against Hitler and the Nazi threat.

Though a parliamentary backbencher without ministerial portfolio, the sometime insider managed to stay remarkably well informed on Germany's secret rearmament and its territorial ambitions throughout the 1930's.

Sympathetically portrayed here as 'the last of England's great Victorian statesmen' for his staunch defense of the empire and its values, Churchill did not beweep his outcast state. The second volume in Manchester's masterly three-part biography (Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 1983) of Winston Churchill, which now limns as well as lionizes the aging Tory during his political exile.

The last lion manchester