Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful

Land sakes! Another book about Winston Churchill? Really? Give us a break, the average reader may think. Actually though, as title and subtitle suggest, this isn’t just another biographical study. It’s at once odder and more conventional than that. More conventional because, in some ways, it is just another biographical study. Odder because — instead of being a straightforward discussion of Churchill’s literary work — it sees literature as the key to his biography. More than that, its author seems to think he has hit on a ‘new methodology’ in which ‘we can write political history as literary history’.

Well, perhaps. At one end of that notion is the banality that politics is ‘showbusiness for ugly people’; at the other are airy overclaims such as that Churchill was ‘an artist who used politics as his creative medium, as other writers used paper’.

Rose is too imprecise, and too infatuated with his conceit, to quite get an anchor into the solid stuff.