The New Criterion

Winston Churchill’s career can seem so grand in scope that it intimidates rather than inspires: an extensive military career, political leadership in two world wars, and roughly eight million published words. In his concise biography, however, Paul Johnson brings the great man down to earth and draws useful lessons from Churchill’s greatness, thus providing a welcome addition to a crowded field. What’s more, he accomplishes his task in a work of only 192 pages.

Johnson tells the story of Churchill’s life without dwelling on any particular period. From his beginnings as a youthful war correspondent, to his mature political career, to his hobbies of landscape painting and brick-laying, no aspect of Churchill’s life is ignored. While Churchill’s greatest speeches and pivotal decisions are all here, they are analyzed with a dispatch that may leave the reader looking for a more complex account. For instance, Churchill’s controversial decision to send British troops into Greece in March 1941, which resulted in the capture of more than ten thousand British troops and the loss of Greece and Crete to Nazi occupation, is defended by Johnson in a few sentences without even a passing reference to British losses in men and equipment.

The greatest insights and pleasures of Johnson’s biography are to be found in the small strokes—in revealing quotations and anecdotes that provide a greater understanding of Churchill’s multifaceted personality. These telling moments demonstrate his often-expressed kindness, his diligence, his thoughtfulness, and his joie de vivre. These traits can stand beside his oratory and voluminous writing as humane accomplishments, truly worthy of emulation.

While focusing on Churchill’s many virtues, Johnson also relishes the barbed witticisms that Churchill flung at friend and foe alike. He could be brutally cutting in his personal attacks; Clement Attlee, the Labour politician, was “a modest man, who has much to be modest about.” John Foster Dulles would make “a beautiful declension: ‘Dull, Duller, Dulles.’” At the same time, in his acts of kindness to former political opponents including Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, and, most surprisingly, the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm, Churchill demonstrated the compassion that co-existed with his sharp tongue.

Johnson is inspiring even when dealing with Churchill’s failures. He demonstrates Churchill’s willingness to admit his mistakes, learn from his defeats, and make up for errors. For example, after being removed as First Lord of the Admiralty due to the disaster in the Dardanelles in WWI, he insisted on fighting with the infantry on the Western Front. Eventually, he greatly assisted the war effort through his work as Minister of Munitions. Churchill consistently returned to respectability after his many reversals through personal sacrifice and national service, not simply through political maneuvering.

An overview of Churchill’s life that instructs rather than awes is Johnson’s great achievement. Like another author of brief lives, Plutarch, Johnson takes the best aspects of Churchill’s heroic spirit and applies them to our own lives. As Plutarch himself put it, “What could do more to raise the standards by which we live?”