Review of FINEST YEARS: Churchill as Warlord, 1940-1945

It is often muttered that the best MPs are those who have experienced a little bit of life first, and not treated politics as a career that begins the moment they graduate from the student union.  Even a career politician like Churchill, who became an MP at a young age, had already been a soldier and journalist, had killed men in battle, and had travelled to far flung corners of the world before he entered Parliament.  In many ways, this tenet could also apply to historians.   Academic life can be a very closed society: one reads, teaches, produces papers, attends conferences, but does that make one qualified to judge the lives of others?  It can pay, I think, to have been around the block a little, especially when dealing with such a towering figure as Churchill, with all his mighty achievements and failures, extraordinary abilities and failings. Read more…