Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2019 - 28

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Book Review
Churchill:
Walking with
Destiny
By ANDREW ROBERTS

Reviewed by The Honorable Paul M. Yatron

A

ndrew Roberts' recently-released biography of Winston
Churchill is a single-volume consisting of 982 pages of
text, 98 pages of notes, which mercifully appear at the
end rather than at the foot of the pages, and what the author
describes as a partial bibliography of 24 pages.
By contrast, the well-known biography by William
Manchester is three volumes, the first of which was published
in 1983, and contains over 2,700 pages of text. The third volume
in that series, which was published only in 2012, was completed
after Manchester's death by his chosen collaborator, Paul Reid.
The work of Martin Gilbert, Churchill's "official biographer,"
consists of eight full volumes, the last of which was published in
1988.
There exist in excess of 1,000 biographies published
encompassing some, or all, of Churchill's life. It may be
wondered why there is continued interest and scholarship in
Churchill's life, especially since there are probably relatively few
people under the age of 40, who would recognize the name as
something other than a style of cigar. Churchill, born in 1874,
died in late January of 1965, at the age of 90. In 1960, Lord
Ismay, who was a general and Churchill's primary military aid
and advisor during World War II, told President Dwight D.
Eisenhower that he believed no truly objective biography of
Churchill could be written before the year 2010.
Roberts had available to him source materials that were
never available to any of his predecessors. Queen Elizabeth II
28 | Berks Barrister

granted Roberts access to the private diaries of her father, King
George VI, who summoned Churchill on what became a fateful
day in 1940 and asked him to form a government. George VI
then worked with Churchill throughout the course of the war.
The diaries include notes that the king made on many topics
concerning his weekly meetings with the Prime Minister. Also
open to Roberts were the verbatim reports of the war cabinet
meetings that were held throughout the course of World War II.
The private papers of Churchill's children also became available
after 2010. The unedited diaries of Ivan Maisky, who was the
Russian Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom during
World War II, also were released in this timeframe.
Roberts has used these new resources, as well as the millions
of words that have previously been written, to produce a superb
single volume biography, which more than adequately explores,
explains, and ultimately lauds, Churchill, a man that this reviewer
regards as the greatest man to live in the 20th century, and the
greatest Englishman ever.
The book is subtitled "Walking with Destiny." It is almost
impossible to imagine a more appropriate one. In Quebec, in
1943, when one of the wartime conferences between Churchill
and Roosevelt took place, Canadian Prime Minister William
Lyon Mackenzie King expressed the view that Churchill was the
only person who could have saved Britain in 1940. Churchill's
response to him was that he had had exceptional training and
experience including the service in the military, the First World
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