Winston Churchill, the author of victory | TLS

Winston Churchill, the author of victory | TLS: But he was not a real historian, and his clever Oxford men could not make him one. For Churchill, the past was never a foreign country, and they did not do things differently there: King Alfred, Marlborough, Chatham and Washington were his contemporaries, who surely thought and felt as he did. Even then his worst defect was his complete lack of objectivity. In 1964, Randolph rashly gave Marlborough to an on-and-off friend. Evelyn Waugh had already mocked Churchill as “a master of sham-Augustan prose”, a writer with “no specifically literary talent but a gift of lucid self-expression” whose work did not survive close attention. On this occasion, Clarke admits that Waugh’s “inveterate distaste for Winston Churchill and all his works” found some justification. “I was everywhere outraged by his partisanship & na�ve assumption of superior virtue”, Waugh ruthlessly replied to Randolph. “It is a shifty barrister’s case not a work of literature.”