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.