“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy, an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then a master, and then a tyrant.” Those owning a business plan, devising an advertising proposal, plotting a military stratagem, drafting an architectural blueprint, painting a picture, crafting sculpture or ceramics, penning a volume, sermon or speech — or editing The Critic — will, I suspect, be nodding in recognition of this.

The words were those of Winston Churchill, the 150th anniversary of whose birthday, 30 November 1874, falls this year. In addition to submitting canvases to the Royal Academy of Arts under the pseudonym David Winter — which resulted in his election as Honorary Academician in 1948 — and twice being Prime Minister for a total of eight years and 240 days, he has merited far more biographies than all his predecessors and successors put together. This summer I completed one more volume to add to the vast collection. My purpose here is less to blow my own trumpet than to ponder why Churchill remains so popular as a subject and survey what is new in print for this anniversary year. 

It is tempting to see his career through many different lenses, for his achievements during a ninety-year lifespan spanning six monarchs encompassed so much more than politics, including that of painter. The only British premier to take part in a cavalry charge under fire, at Omdurman on 2 September 1898, he was also the first to possess an atomic weapon, when a test device was detonated in Western Australia on 3 October 1952. Besides being known as an animal breeder, aristocrat, aviator, big-game hunter, bon viveur, bricklayer, broadcaster, connoisseur of cigars and fine fines (his preferred Martini recipe included Plymouth gin and ice, “supplemented with a nod toward France”), essayist, gambler, global traveller, horseman, journalist, landscape gardener, lepidopterist, monarchist, newspaper editor, Nobel Prize-winner, novelist, orchid-collector, parliamentarian, polo player, prison escapee, public schools fencing champion, rose-grower, sailor, soldier, speechmaker, statesman, war correspondent, war hero, warlord and wit, one of his many lives was that of writer-historian. 

Most of his long life revolved around words and his use of them. Hansard recorded 29,232 contributions made by Churchill in the Commons; he penned one novel, thirty non-fiction books, and published twenty-seven volumes of speeches in his lifetime, in addition to thousands of newspaper despatches, book chapters and magazine articles. Historically, much understanding of his time is framed around the words he wrote about himself. “Not only did Mr. Churchill both get his war and run it: he also got in the first account of it” was the verdict of one writer, which might be the wish of many successive public figures. Acknowledging his rhetorical powers, which set him apart from all other twentieth century politicians, his patronymic has gravitated into the English language: Churchillian resonates far beyond adherence to a set of policies, which is the narrow lot of most adjectival political surnames.

“I have frequently been forced to eat my words. I have always found them a most nourishing diet”, Churchill once quipped at a dinner party, and on another occasion, “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. Yet “Winston” and “Churchill” are the words of a conjuror, that immediately convey a romance, a spell, and wonder that one man could have achieved so much. It is an enduring magic, and difficult to penetrate. In 2002, by way of example, he was ranked first in a BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons of All Time — amongst many similar accolades. A less well-known survey of modern politics and history academics conducted by MORI and the University of Leeds in November 2004 placed Attlee above Churchill as the 20th Century’s most successful prime minister in legislative terms — but he was still in second place of the twenty-one PMs from Salisbury to Blair.

Modern Churchill scholarship is an unrelenting tsunami, much still amounting to excessive hagiography

As much a global figure as a British politician, Churchill was one of the first international media celebrities. With his many uniforms, (he was entitled to wear the rank and insignia of an army colonel, an RAF air commodore and the jaunty nautical attire of an Elder Brother of Trinity House, protectors of seafarers since 1514), hats, silver-topped walking canes, silk dressing gowns and siren suits, spotted bow ties and ever-present cigars, he was a man of props, which boosted his familiarity to people in the pre-television age. In August 1941 he was first recorded as the author of the V for Victory sign, which he mostly remembered to give with the knuckles facing in. It was a gesture that encapsulated the defiance, hope and determination he had offered the previous year. 

Like his other props, the V-sign became a trademark of the man and a symbol of the resolution of the free world that was drawn on walls across occupied Europe, and translated into morse code or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, broadcast over the global airwaves. Meanwhile, Winston’s own image has since featured in 63 film and TV portrayals, from Young Winston to Dr Who, and on currency, postage stamps and pottery tankards, and he has had warships, tanks, locomotives, several schools, a Cambridge college, champagne, whisky, cocktails, coinage and cigars named after him. Blessed with intelligence, wit and wisdom, he was mostly self-educated, not having attended a university, although in later years he would sit as Chancellor or Rector of three universities and be awarded one honorary professorship and eleven honorary degrees. 

Born in the era of boots and saddles, among Prime Minsters he was unique in being recommended for a Victoria Cross in his youth (in June 1900 during the Boer War), and in old age advocating the use of weapons of mass destruction. Less known than his ‘fight-them-on-the-beaches’ defiance, during the Second World War his more nuanced approach to war-making included asking Bomber Command to consider ‘in cold blood by sensible people, and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across… to drench Germany with [non-lethal] gas.’ And during the stalling Normandy campaign, pressed his Chiefs of Staff on 6 July 1944, ‘to think very seriously over this question of poison gas’. 

Churchill truly believed he was destined for greatness to the extent that he saved everything he ever wrote. As a writer and multi-volume biographer of his ancestor Marlborough and father Lord Randolph, neither small projects and coming in at 779,000 and 278,000 words respectively, he was only too aware of the shortcomings of many libraries of personal documents, collected haphazardly like random archaeological sherds after the subject’s death. Accordingly, he started his own. Many of the extant speeches, personal letters, newspaper reports and state papers are the result of Winston’s archiving of his own life, right down to household bills and receipts. These have ended up in the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, established in 1973. It has since collected many other relevant papers of statesmen and military and parliamentary contemporaries, including those of his fixer Brendan Bracken, secretary Jock Colville and successor Clement Attlee, and most have now been digitised. 

His life was recorded in print by his official biographers, son Randolph and after his death, the academic Sir Martin Gilbert, in their immense, 3,111,090-word, eight-volume work, allegedly the longest in history, published between 1966-88. Designed to accompany it are the exhaustive 23 Companion Volumes of documents and letters, variously edited by Randolph Churchill, Martin Gilbert and latterly the American scholar, Larry Arnn, which appeared over the course of 50 years, from 1967-2019. They amount to 15.3 million words and stretch to nearly three yards on my bookshelves. As Andrew Roberts, author of Walking With Destiny (2018), the best recent single-volume on Winston, reminds us, few other lives have ever been so minutely and comprehensively recorded through paperwork, which is one reason why so many works on Churchill have been penned. 

This proffers a huge primary source mine of which many contemporary scholars have made great use. These include Dough Lough, who in 2015 brought us the ground-breaking No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, an innovative study of Churchill’s inability to curb his spending, or Jonathan Sandys and Wallace Henley, who in the same year published the thoughtful God and Churchill. Cita Stelzer examined the important role of Churchill’s staff in Working with Winston (2019) while Paul Rafferty discussed Winston Churchill: Painting on the Riviera (2020) and Oliver Williams made a light-hearted exploration of an unlikely friendship in Winston Churchill and The Queen (2022). Thus, if you want to know about Winston’s cigars, his relationship with God or alcohol, his culinary tastes, war records, firearms, London tailor’s bills, or plans for painting holidays, then there will be documentation leading you to the appropriate subject, always accompanied by a sense that the Great Man is looking down, nodding his head in approval.

Modern Churchill scholarship is an unrelenting tsunami, much still amounting to excessive hagiography, though complemented by a growing school of iconoclasm which criticises Winston not only for his imperial attitudes, for what he did or omitted to do, but also for what he claimed he had done in his books. Attlee was surely correct in his view that his predecessor was ‘fifty per cent genius, fifty per cent bloody fool’. Sets of collected essays, such as Robert Blake and William Roger Louis’ Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (1993), Richard Toye’s Winston Churchill: Politics, Strategy and Statecraft (2017) and Alan Packwood’s more recent Cambridge Companion to Winston Churchill (2023), assemble chapters by different authors on multitudinous aspects of the subject’s life. Another useful starting point for further study in the International Churchill Society, which grew out of the American Churchill Centre, founded in 1968. It publishes the quarterly Finest Hour magazine and a monthly e-newsletter, the Chartwell Bulletin. 

There will always be something fresh and interesting to discover about this most intriguing of Western leaders

To retain a vestige of objectivity when faced with the Churchill spell, modern scholarship is now concluding that Winston’s relationship with the historical truth was not always as objective as he himself would have us believe. David Reynolds’ In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2004) has emphasised how aspects of Churchill’s flawed decision-making during the Second World War were played down or excluded from his six-volume account of the same name. He reveals that the major histories were written by teams of literary assistants and polished by Churchill, who nevertheless minutely directed each enterprise. 

Sonia Purnell is one of the few to have highlighted the role of his strong-willed wife, Clementine “Clemmie” Hozier, whom Winston married in 1908, but is surprisingly little referred to in his own works. Clemmie’s rock solid, but not uncritical support for him, particularly as chatelaine of Chartwell during in his Wilderness Years of the inter-war period, and her prompts for him to show humility during the wartime era of his triumph, shaped his character and policies, and shored him up during moments of depression.

We have John and Celia Lee to thank for reappraising the role of Winston’s younger brother, who was also airbrushed out of history, usually by Winston himself in their Winston and Jack (2007). ) He was an engaging and honourable man who served in the Boer War with his sibling, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, winning a DSO, and as a stockbroker shielded his brother from the worst effects of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and lived in Downing Street during the war after being bombed out of his own home. 

The self-destructive behaviour of Winston’s only son, Randolph, also had a bearing on his father, who spoilt him. As Josh Ireland recounts in his Churchill and Son (2021), Winston never referred to this, but during the 1930s, Randolph’s affairs with the bottle, women, in trying to enter Parliament and his monstrous moods caused huge rifts in the family. In the war years, Randolph’s domestic disagreements with his parents grew so violent that Clemmie thought her husband might suffer a seizure. The son’s erratic service with Special Forces behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia, merely added to the Prime Minister’s stress. 

During 1941, cast adrift and close to divorce, Randolph’s first wife Pamela Digby, conducted an affair with Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe, then coordinating the Lend-Lease programme. Although this led to the breakdown of her marriage, her Harriman ‘alliance’ probably aided Britain’s war effort significantly more than did the younger Churchill, and she supported Clementine as an energetic hostess at many important prime ministerial gatherings. Sonia Purnell, who this year has also chronicled Pamela’s life in Kingmaker (2024) observes that his daughter-in-law, who after the death of her second husband married Averell Harriman, is considered far more important to the Winston Churchill story than his own son, Randolph.

In 2021, Ruth Trethewey surveyed the lives of the three surviving Churchill daughters (a fourth, Marigold, died aged two of septicaemia), who played key supportive roles in his premiership, albeit minimised by their father, but left important memoirs. In the war years, each wore a different uniform of the women’s forces, helping to project the Churchill “brand”. The eldest, Diana, served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Sarah worked in photo intelligence for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, accompanied her father to the Teheran and Yalta conferences and was romantically linked to the American ambassador, John Winant. 

Mary joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, commanded anti-aircraft batteries and travelled to Potsdam as her father’s ADC. Trethewey’s takeaway is that although Winston and the formidable Clemmie enjoyed fifty-seven happy years together, their four children clocked up eight marriages between them. Winston’s own personality swamped those of his family, and though a devoted father, was often away from home — ‘either fighting wars or fighting elections’, as Mary later observed. They accepted that he must come first — ‘and second and third’. Thus, Churchill’s life was strongly underpinned by his extended family, though writers tend to be bedazzled by the man alone.

What else will be appearing in this bumper year for Churchilliana? Andrew Liddle has released a much-needed micro study of Winston’s tenure of his parliamentary seat of Dundee between 1908 and 1922 in Winston Churchill: The Scottish Years. Making a formidable writing duo, former General Richard Dannatt and Churchill scholar Allen Packwood are responsible for a second micro history, Churchill’s D-Day, which examines the prime minister’s role in the Normandy invasion, from its inception to its planning and execution. Another former general, John Kizsley has this year released his portrait of Churchill’s principal military liaison officer in General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay. He knew Churchill’s mind better than most throughout the war and in 1952 became the first Secretary General of NATO. Ismay thus also swims into Anthony Tucker-Jones’ excellent second Churchill biographical volume, Winston Churchill: Cold War Warrior, which deals with his second, less lustrous premiership. The author reminds us that Churchill subtitled the sixth and last volume of his history of the Second World War “Triumph and Tragedy,” which can be seen as a metaphor of his own life during those years. 

Other books out in 2024 deal with Winston’s transatlantic life: oft-forgotten is that he was half-American through his mother. In Mr Churchill in the White House, Robert Schmuhl has analysed the Prime Minister’s relations with two presidents, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, which were less smooth than we might assume. Cita Stelzer in her Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship takes a different approach, using contemporary newspaper reports of lecture tours and interactions with leading American figures between 1895 and 1939 to discuss the friends who had Roosevelt’s ear while FDR was deciding how to help Britain in opposing Germany. 

My favourite so far is Katherine Carter’s, Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm. Carter holds a special place in Churchill iconography as the current curator of Chartwell, and chronicles the political life of the house throughout the 1930s via its visitor’s book and with such relish that one can smell the cigar smoke exude from every page. Adrian Phillips covers the same period through a quartet of Churchill’s most devious accomplices, Max Beaverbrook, Robert Boothby, Brendan Bracken, and Frederick Lindemann in Winston’s Bandits: Churchill and His Maverick Friends. Both volumes are long overdue, emphasise Churchill’s reliance on the brilliance of others, and demonstrate that Brendan Bracken in particular is in need of a decent biography. At a time when his reputation is under attack by ignorant voices around the world, this collective cascade of Churchilliana proves that with diligent scholarship — generally lacking among the critics — there will always be something fresh and interesting to discover about this most intriguing of Western leaders.