GREAT LINE:

The socialists loved ideas, but Churchill, the unrepentant Victorian Tory, loved life.

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When a German-educated Oxford professor of physics was asked who was the smartest person he had ever met, he replied without hesitation, “Winston Churchill.” Churchill was undoubtedly also one of the most complex, and probably had more influence on world history than any other democratically elected leader in the last 100 years. He was born into privilege at the height of Victorian imperialism, educated in its best and worst ideals, and then tried to uphold and preserve those ideals (and that empire) against the terrible tragedies and absolute monsters of the 20th Century. Manchester was both an historian and a novelist and so does a wonderful job exploring Churchill’s psychology, how great strengths were the sources of both brilliant success and perplexing failure. This is a long two-volume work, but the first two chapters of Volume One summarize Churchill’s career and explain what it must have felt like to be a part of the British Empire in all its glory so these two chapters can be read as a stand-alone work. But readers wanting to know more have both volumes of Manchester’s work to educate them.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Last Lion