Winston S. Churchill

The New World

Simon Elliott Stegall

Churchill's general high-quality history continues in book 2 of his series. I am still impressed with his high-level analysis of the invisible forces of the times, and how they move people like chess on a board. He does a great job showing how certain aspects of Englishness (first developed Parliament in the West, first state-sanctioned Reformation in the Catholic world, etc) were products of several hundred years of national character and habit. He makes complex wars comprehensible and entertaining, and provides unique and extremely balanced perspectives on classic characters like Cardinal Wolesly and Oliver Cromwell. It's fun, it's smart, it's memorable. The good is all there.

However I have to dock a star. I began to get a bit annoyed with some idiosyncracies that I think it's fair to chalk up to the fact that the books were not written, but were dictated to secretaries while Churchill was an active MP trying to prevent the rise of Hitler. Lots of the book operates at a high level, with little detail, as it must, since it covers hundreds of years; but that being said, sometimes the lack of detail is crippling to a passage. Often Churchill will mention a location or an event and leave it with no explanation or summary whatesoever. I assume he thought the average reader would know about St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, for example, so he just mentions it and moves on. However, I had to look it up to appreciate the significance. This would have been far more annoying if I were reading this in the days before the internet.

There are also some blatant grammatical errors (not many, but enough to raise some eyebrows), which again, I chalk up to dictation, and a few more obnoxious elements that simply didn't age well at all; the American slave trade is only mentioned in passing, for example, with no adequate treatment... although I'm sure he'll address it more in the next book, which actually deals with the founding of America, it still feels a little jarring for a modern reader. This is not to say Churchill isn't sensitive to cruelty- he declaims in very very strong language Cromwell's atrocities against the Irish- but a modern writer would obviously have included more censorious language when describing American slavery. It's a bit jarring to read a matter-of-fact description of such things.

Overall, Churchill's style has definite quirks. But the other side of that coin is that his history is never, never dull. So far I would unhesitatingly recommend this series to anyone who wants an entertaining and easy-to-read history of England and America, and who won't be offended by a few tics from an extremely idiosyncratic man, who was nonetheless one of England's greatest history-makers in his own right.

The New World

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