Andrew Roberts
A Man for All Seasons
It’s an old publishing saw – ‘Of the writing of books with Winston Churchill in the title or subtitle there shall be no end’ – and a good thing too. Here are four books covering four very different aspects of Churchill – namely, the buildings in his life, what painting meant to him, his relationship with the nuclear bomb, and his activities in the year 1899 – and each manages to shed fresh light on the Greatest Englishman. When people ask, ‘What more is there to say about Churchill?’, which they still do with depressing regularity, the answer is that every year, even half a century after his death, people are either finding new things to say or saying old things in a better way than hitherto.
Leslie Hossack’s beautifully produced and illustrated Charting Churchill (www.lesliehossack.ca 162pp CAD$196.4) describes itself as an ‘architectural biography’, reproducing sixty large, sumptuous contemporary photographs of places that played an important part in Churchill’s life. Starting with the bedroom at Blenheim Palace in which he was born, it takes the reader to every
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review
I reviewed Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut
'Retired judges have usually had long careers on the bench, during which they have acquired an ingrained reticence when it comes to speaking on controversial topics. Not so Sumption.'
Dominic Grieve reviews Jonathan Sumption's 'Law in a Time of Crisis'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-case-for-the-citizen