“The Last Lion” is very good on Churchill the hero. Reid claims that he updated the research he inherited from Manchester, but there’s little evidence of that. Unfortunately, much has been discovered in the interim, by historians such as Paul Addison, Peter Hennessey, Angus Calder, Roy Jenkins, Max Hastings and others.
This is because it was researched in the 1980s but written decades later.
Yet it is strange to find a new book that seems so old - rather like an ancient butterfly sealed in amber. He was a storyteller who made history accessible by masterful use of the dramatist’s tools.” “The Last Lion” fits that mold: This biography has the dramatic punch of a great novel. As he writes, his mentor “was not an academic. Reid has done a superb job of creating a book that reads like Manchester. At the time, only a tenth of the more than 1,000 pages had been written. Before he died in 2004, he handed the book over to his friend Paul Reid, a journalist. Manchester had essentially completed the research by 1998, but then ill health made writing impossible. In truth, however, it’s a book about Churchill’s war. “The Last Lion,” the third installment of William Manchester’s biography of Churchill, starts in 1940, when he became prime minister, and ends with his death in 1965. How strange, then, that such a corpulent tome has so much missing. The similarity goes further: Rather like Churchill, this book is very fat. “The Last Lion” is a majestic saga in the Victorian style - vivid, articulate, beautifully composed, grand in scope but thin on introspection. The latest biography of Churchill has much in common with the man himself. He had an enormous personality but a simplistic outlook: He saw the past as a collection of heroic tales immune to analysis.
Winston Churchill was an old-fashioned hero - majestic, eloquent, effusive, addicted to drama.
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