I didn’t intend to write on Andrew Roberts’s biography of Winston Churchill, because so many smart people have written on it so well. Also, I don’t belong to the Churchill cult. He was a great man, arguably the greatest of the 20th century, and right on the central question of his age, the meaning of Hitler. He had both political and literary genius, the first Western political figure of whom that could be said since Lincoln. He was brave and he was a visionary; he understood and wrote about the implications of splitting the atom long before it was split. He was also a person of titanic self-regard driven by a sense of destiny that occasionally verged on the half-mad. He made blunders for which others suffered and forgave himself too quickly and too much. And he was bloody-minded. “I love this war,” he confided to a friend at the height of World War I, when he was first lord of the admiralty. “I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it.”
He did. War was opportunity. He didn’t think the lights were going out all over Europe, he thought the lights were about to shine brightly on his name.