Winston S Churchill

"I remember when I was a very young researcher going to interview Martin Gilbert at a house he had in west London and going down to his basement. There were a lot of shelves in this vast basement and every shelf was piled with documents about Churchill’s life. It was the excitement of being with somebody who was so determined to get every single fact right. Yes, and he really had this extraordinary commitment to detail. He interwove oral recollections with documentary evidence and had this painstaking commitment to a reconstruction of Winston Churchill’s life. It speaks of a facet of an historian’s work, which is to understand intimately what is going on in the life of the subject they are studying. And the publication of these immensely detailed diaries and then the companion volumes is a service to history in its study of the greatest prime minister of the last century. And indeed he was honoured for it with a knighthood “for services to British history and international relations”. It is a different kind of history to my first two choices. This is the biggest political biography of the modern era. When I went to Gilbert’s basement it was like going down to the engine room of a ship. It was so exciting to see it all coming together. Any biographer is aware of how random the selection of their material is. We justify that selectivity on all kinds of grounds – the truth is that we are often selective because we don’t have any more time. A library is closing, or it is time to go to bed, or friends are arriving for dinner and we just have to make selections about what episode we are going to talk about and how we are going to write about it. Martin Gilbert is at the other end of the extreme in that he is not deciding what to put in because he is putting everything in. Martin Gilbert’s work is criticised by those who often haven’t read it and he is referred to as somebody who is a chronicler and not a historian. But he has written his one volume, Churchill : A Life , which draws on the work of the biography and the companion books. I think we need all different kinds of biography. We need highly selective biographies, we need iconoclastic biographies. We need bombastic biographies and here is a comprehensive biography. They all have their different roles. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."