This is an excellent book: readable, scholarly, clear in its judgments and, for students of modern British politics, both amateur and professional, interesting about the two greatest politicians of the first half of the 20th century. It is a pity that press hysteria about one unpublished article ghost- written for Churchill should have overshadowed the rest of Richard Toye’s efforts. Martin Gilbert has already commented magisterially on the matter in this magazine and Toye himself says Churchill’s 1937 views ‘were not wildly exceptional for the time’. Enough said.
Early 21st-century man prefers, like Chairman Mao, to let the past serve the present. If he stopped making jejune moral judgments about his ancestors and tried to understand what made them tick instead, he might make less of a mess of his own times.
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