Richard Overy

How I Won

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing The Second World War

By

Allen Lane The Penguin Press 746pp £30 order from our bookshop

In 1950, reviewing the third of Winston Churchill’s six volumes on the Second World War, Michael Foot perceptively noted his ‘carefulness as an autobiographer’ and his ‘carelessness as an historian’. This is in essence the text of David Reynolds’s fascinating and equally perceptive account of how Churchill came to write what did amount to the story of ‘Churchill’s war’. Economical with the truth, eloquently silent on so many things, Churchill manufactured a legend which fifty years of subsequent scholarship has scarcely diminished.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    Follow Us