Paul Addison
Prime Scribbler
Mr Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator, Writer
By Peter Clarke
Bloomsbury 347pp £20 order from our bookshop
Churchill the statesman had a lifelong ally in Churchill the writer. The statesman won office and power but a ministerial salary never covered more than a fraction of the costs of a Churchillian lifestyle. It was the huge sums he commanded as a journalist and author that enabled him to enter the House of Commons and support a wife, family and substantial household, not to mention magnums of champagne. But his writings were also an integral part of his politics – advertising his name, vindicating his record, and publicising his ideas.
In his book In Command of History (2004), David Reynolds revealed the inside story of the writing of Churchill’s war memoirs. The discovery that much of the text was ghost written or economical with the truth had curiously little effect on his reputation: myth-making, perhaps, counted as one of his
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
'Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria ... was as full of trouble and strife as the most harrowing of hard-luck case histories.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise