Volume 49, Number 3 · February 28, 2002
Rescuing Churchill
By Simon Schama
Churchill
by Roy Jenkins
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,002 pp., $40.00
The last thing George Orwell published was a May 1949 review of Volume Two of Winston Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War, Their Finest Hour. You might expect him to have been allergic to its chest-thumping patriotism, its flights of empurpled rhetoric; but not a bit of it. Churchill's writings, Orwell observed, bestowing the most meaningful accolade he could manage, were 'more like those of a human being than of a public figure.' Though in 1939 Orwell had been suspicious of Churchill's belligerent rhetoric and ominous potential for a personality cult of his own, by the time he came to write 1984, it was not Big Brother who would be baptized Winston but the doomed renegade, 'the last man.'
Review, 4866 words
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