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