The Second World War

Churchill's history runs to six volumes, from the peace settlement that failed to prevent a second war through to the peace that ended it, and its great advantage over any other account of the period is that its author ran much of it. He writes the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the years of shifting alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin as a participant recalling decisions he made himself, and he backs the narrative with his own wartime minutes, telegrams and memoranda, so the reader is often looking at the actual paper Churchill signed rather than a historian's later reconstruction of what it said.

That closeness is also the book's clearest limitation. Churchill is never a neutral witness, and he does not pretend otherwise; the account favors his own judgment in the arguments he lost as well as the ones he won, and material still classified when he wrote could not appear at all. The set opens with a moral he wants the reader to carry through all six volumes: in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill; and the prose throughout carries the same rolling, cadenced rhythm as his wartime speeches, built for reading aloud as much as for reading alone.

It suits a reader who wants the war experienced from inside its command decisions rather than from a distanced modern analysis, and the scale rewards patience: six volumes of cabinet rooms, ambassadors and armies moving across a map, narrated by the one man who was in nearly every room where the decisions were actually made. Reading it means accepting Churchill as guide and advocate at once, which is exactly what makes the account as vivid as it is incomplete.