When the Lion Still Roared

With hindsight, the years 1945–51 seem like an interlude between Winston Churchill’s two premierships, while Clement Attlee and the Labour party held power. But Churchill had a remarkable capacity for making history out of office, as well as in office. What might be termed his second wilderness years are a case in point—as this latest volume of documents vividly shows.

Far from being the “anti-climax” Churchill initially dreaded, he used the time to prodigious effect. Aided by his “Syndicate” of assistants and financed in style by his publishers, he completed five of the eventual six volumes of war memoirs. We can read his progress reports to Clementine, his queries about delicate issues such as the Dieppe Raid or the bombing of Dresden, his unconcealed pride when telling his King that 250,000 copies of Their Finest Hour had been sold in a single day, and his regular complaints about the workload: “Volume IV is a worse tyrant than Attlee.”

During this same period, Churchill delivered 266 speeches, including 100 in the House of Commons—usually substantial works of intellect and oratory, requiring hours of assiduous drafting and re-redrafting. Some of these were what we might consider party pieces—castigating the about Lend-Lease. Amid the political barbs, there are also pearls of enduring wisdom, such as his warning against those who believe that “if an untruth is told often enough and widely enough it becomes as good as the truth.”