I didn't finish this book. Jenkins just throws his note cards at the hapless reader. The editor was awol. Stick with Gilbert. Alternatively, start with Manchester's unfinished bio (to 1940) & then switch to Churchill's memoirs.

This is too long - all biographers should read and learn from Lytton Strachey.

But Churchill's life was so over the top that its nevertheless an enjoyable read; more so with two provisos:

1. You have to be at least constructively disposed to Winston. Better still if you downright adore him, as Roy plainly does.

2. The most lovingly recounted incidents are those that took place in and around parliamentary life, the life that Roy Jenkins himself knew best. Its very, very well told, but if you didn't happen to be an MP yourself you might find it a little too detailed, in the sense that what others might consider to be the main story seems to be lost sight of, sometimes.

For several years I have wanted to read a biography on Churchill. This past summer I finally broke down and purchased the 900+ page book written by Roy Jenkins.

It has only taken six months to finish it. True, I had a dissertation to write and exams to study for. But regardless the book was slow going.

The author is a politician and a writer - much like Churchill. Consequently, Jenkins focuses the book on the intricacies of Churchill's political and journalistic careers. Fair enough.

Churchill's political life and to a lesser extent his various literary endeavors are key to understanding Britain's greatest prime minister. But the details, though interesting, slowly wear down the resolve of the reader.

For example, the beginning and ending of the book flows well as Churchill's family heritage and retirement are explored; in other words, the parts of Churchill's life which are the least political and literary.

Yet by the time we reach his parliamentary career and the two world wars the book descends into minute detail. Minute details about his toast filled summits with Stalin - interesting. Minute details about his administration of the Admiralty - not so much.

Further, he dedicates a surprisingly small amount of space to some very important events - such as the Battle of Britain.

Yet, to be fair, Jenkins provides an excellent overview of Churchill's life. It is also inevitable that certain areas of interest to the reader will not coincide with that of the author.

Indeed, the biographer's experience in British politics provides rare insights: the great PM's great ambition was getting power, using power and retaining power. So, the way Jenkins skillfully dissects and interprets Churchill's various power struggles makes the book worth reading.

Summary: The book is a great introduction to Churchill, with a special focus on his political and literary careers. Yet the combination of the books length and the author's devotion to great detail could prove fatal to the unmotivated.

I would recommend the book to anyone interested in 20th century history, modern British history and of course Churchill. But I would recommend that the reader take long breaks between each of the six sections.

Think Robert Kosowsky's review is pretty much on the mark.

Historical events are not presented except in relation to timing and political positioning by Churchill and others. For example, if you don't know about the Dardenelles operation of WW1, this book will not help you. Despite the final line of the book, this is not uncritical of Churchill and at times makes him appear to be motivated by politics as much as anything else (the author was a MP and in the Cabinet so was a political animal too). This does not ring entirely false as it makes it easier to understand his switching of political parties. And this makes it a good counter to Churchill's own books which are at times clearly self-serving.

This was a fine biography on Churchill. At its heart, this book is a comprehensive political summary of one of the world's best politicians. Jenkins does a great job of surrounding the moment with context and analysis. His mastery of British politics is unreal.

With all that said, the book did have a few flaws. First, it was hard to grasp the ins and outs of the British political process which Jenkins discusses at great lengths (this could be my fault as I am an American). Second, there was not enough character development. Jenkins references countless people, but does not take the time to highlight, or bring about, who ultimately has a major role. To this end, I feel there was a certain extent of "name-dropping" in the tome. At times, this made the book harder to navigate through with ease. Finally, I don't know French or Afrikaans, or Latin. So those phrases in foreign languages fell upon deaf ears (or perhaps blind eyes is the more appropriate description).

Overall, a great book. I enjoyed Jenkins mastery of the subject matter, and his writing is fantastic. I have not read other Churchill bios before, but would certainly recommend this to a history buff.

This biography is extremely interesting but also uneven. Roy Jenkins was a major British political figure himself, sitting in both the House of Commons and then later in the House of Lords as the Baron Jenkins of Hillhead of Pontypool in the County of Gwent. He was member of the Labour Party, and entered Parliament towards the end of Chruchill's career. He was a member of the Cabinet, having served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position Churchill once held, and came close to becoming Prime Minister himself. As a result, he certainly has a unique background and exceptionally rare expertise among Churchill biographers. In fact, the best parts of this book are when Lord Jenkins relates his own experiences to those of Churchill.

Jenkins also has some literary talent, having won the Whitbread Prize for his biography of William Gladstone, the legendary nineteenth century Prime Minister. This British book award is roughly equal to the Pulitzer Prize here in the United States.

The biography Jenkins produced is an easy read. He was clearly writing with an American audience in mind and explains some of the less obvious British political terms or how an individual with a title of nobility could be a member of the House of Commons. He also treats his subject with respect, despite their political differences.

That said, this book has a number of problems. The coverage Jenkins provides focuses primarily on Churchill's political career. Discussion of his personal life is there, but it is rather limited. His coverage of foreign policy and matters of strategy is adequate but only adequate. His explanation of some subjects is more shallow than Sir Martin Gilbert's one volume biography. The events surrounding the dukedom that Queen Elizabeth II offered Churchill, but which he eventually turned down, comes to mind immediately. Jenkins is also slipshod in his use of facts and quotes. I am writing a book in which Churchill is a central figure and I saw a number of good quotes that I thought would make my study a little more interesting. After consulting the original sources, I discovered that Jenkins had gotten it wrong. This misquoting happened time and time again.

So in short, you won't go wrong reading this biography but there are better Churchill books out there.

Roy Jenkins was the son of a Welsh miner, both father and son becoming Labour MP's. He excelled academically, and from an early age assumed a famously grand manner of speaking. The Marquis of Salisbury said that Jenkins made him feel common, and Aneurin Bevan, on being told that the young Jenkins was brilliant but lazy, replied `Brilliant he may be, but a boy from Abersychan who talks like that? You can't tell me he's lazy.' Jenkins failed narrowly to become British prime minister, but he held the same two of the `three great offices of state' - Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer - as Churchill himself did, and there is something about the languid assurance of his narrative that suggests that he feels at home in such company. In particular, when I read his rather bald ex cathedra final assessment that Churchill rather than Gladstone was the greatest of prime ministers I almost sensed an unspoken `and I would know about that.'

President Kennedy said to Gore Vidal `But for the Civil War nobody would have heard of Lincoln.' Similarly, if Churchill had not become wartime prime minister, it is perfectly arguable that Jenkins might have had the more distinguished career. Churchill was not an outstanding Home Secretary, whereas Jenkins deserves immortality as the Home Secretary who put the weight of the government behind the abolition of the death penalty in Britain. As Chancellor Jenkins (Labour, remember) was named by none other than Mrs Thatcher as the best since the war, whereas Churchill's time at the Treasury is mainly notable for the disastrous adoption of the gold standard, albeit against his own better judgment.

The main focus of the narrative is political, in my opinion rightly. Asquith complained that Churchill not only talked too much but that it was all about politics. However politics is largely a matter of personalities, and Jenkins builds up a coherent picture of the aspects of his subject's character that led him to become what he became. Churchill's physical courage was apparent from his time in the Boer War, and his relentless driving energy strikes me as downright phenomenal - I am daunted even by the amount he ate, let alone by how much he drank, let alone how much he managed to do in spite of all that. He was undistracted by affairs or infidelities certainly, but he always had time for his family as well as his painting and bricklaying, to say nothing of his phenomenal literary output, something to which Jenkins, as another author, devotes considerable space.

This book is biography, not history, but while the two are inseparable Jenkins doesn't force his own judgements on us. I started by regretting this, but gradually I came to prefer it. Jenkins is thorough, and we are taken methodically through who did what and said what. Churchill's more spectacular clangers -the Dardanelles in WWI, the Gold Standard, the Abdication, his ludicrous views on Indian independence - are set in context without preaching. Whatever made Churchill great, it wasn't consistency of judgment. What should make this book mandatory reading for those who take a simplistic view of the lead-up to WWII is Jenkins's flat account of the matter. I started by wanting him to take a view on what constituted `appeasement' (a slogan if there was ever one) but I prefer Jenkins's way. The trick with Churchill was to harness that volcano of energy to the right cause, and I guess we were lucky. Chamberlain, not Churchill, declared war on Germany. Munich was not very dignified, but Britain was rearming under Chamberlain and needed to play for time. Going to war when we did was none too overdue, and I wonder whether Churchill might not have blown it by bulldog-at-a-gate reaction.

What makes a politician `great'? Luck and PR for the most part, I'd say. Churchill was an outsize personality. He had a terrific gift of phrase, he could dominate, but above all he could talk everyone into acquiescence. That kind of acquiescence doesn't last long, and Jenkins's nicely-judged assessments of this or that speech are probably more significant to Jenkins as another speech-maker than to most of us. A lot of so-called `leadership' is really just a holding operation - don't fall flat on your face even once. Churchill had a job to do, it was a job he wanted, he had the energy for it, and could he ever talk. The British public were not overawed with his oratory, they just felt it was up to what the occasion called for. He didn't fight the war, they did. They felt they owed him nothing, and they owed him nothing.

The book is a bit of a marathon, I'm sorry to say. Jenkins was no mean talker, in particular he was a devastating parliamentary debater. He is an excellent biographer if this is anything to go by, he is probably a good historian, but he is a downright bad writer. I would not have expected occasional bad grammar, bad syntax and misuse of words from such an aesthete, but they're here. He has a tin ear for English, particularly adverbs - `possibly excessively' `friendlily' and (dear God) `deadenly'. Such adverbs read to me uglily and ungainlily. Would `an united...' or `an horrendous...' pass in an English exam? If I were the examiner, not, er, an hope. Use of nouns and names as adjectives is an Americanism that doesn't suit him, but he uses it ad nauseam, and when it comes to the like of `an appealing (to Churchill) Texan companion' or `the then only seven-year-old redbrick and brown terracotta Midland Hotel' the entire English-speaking community should rise up in revolt.

At Fulton MO Churchill proposed an English-speaking alliance to outweigh his so-called Iron Curtain that he had negotiated in the first place. Stalin's response was obvious, and mine would have been the same in Stalin's place. Even dictators can talk sense, and Churchill got inebriated with his own verbosity, yet this is one sort of thing that he is supposed to be `great' for. Jenkins was a liberal-minded social democrat and his calm view of what caused so much excitement and worse should be a corrective to much that we are seeing today. If only he had said it better.

Roy Jenkins was the son of a Welsh miner, both father and son becoming Labour MP's. He excelled academically, and from an early age assumed a famously grand manner of speaking. The Marquis of Salisbury said that Jenkins made him feel common, and Aneurin Bevan, on being told that the young Jenkins was brilliant but lazy, replied `Brilliant he may be, but a boy from Abersychan who talks like that? You can't tell me he's lazy.' Jenkins failed narrowly to become British prime minister, but he held the same two of the `three great offices of state' - Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer - as Churchill himself did, and there is something about the languid assurance of his narrative that suggests that he feels at home in such company. In particular, when I read his rather bald ex cathedra final assessment that Churchill rather than Gladstone was the greatest of prime ministers I almost sensed an unspoken `and I would know about that.'

President Kennedy said to Gore Vidal `But for the Civil War nobody would have heard of Lincoln.' Similarly, if Churchill had not become wartime prime minister, it is perfectly arguable that Jenkins might have had the more distinguished career. Churchill was not an outstanding Home Secretary, whereas Jenkins deserves immortality as the Home Secretary who put the weight of the government behind the abolition of the death penalty in Britain. As Chancellor Jenkins (Labour, remember) was named by none other than Mrs Thatcher as the best since the war, whereas Churchill's time at the Treasury is mainly notable for the disastrous adoption of the gold standard, albeit against his own better judgment.

The main focus of the narrative is political, in my opinion rightly. Asquith complained that Churchill not only talked too much but that it was all about politics. However politics is largely a matter of personalities, and Jenkins builds up a coherent picture of the aspects of his subject's character that led him to become what he became. Churchill's physical courage was apparent from his time in the Boer War, and his relentless driving energy strikes me as downright phenomenal - I am daunted even by the amount he ate, let alone by how much he drank, let alone how much he managed to do in spite of all that. He was undistracted by affairs or infidelities certainly, but he always had time for his family as well as his painting and bricklaying, to say nothing of his phenomenal literary output, something to which Jenkins, as another author, devotes considerable space.

This book is biography, not history, but while the two are inseparable Jenkins doesn't force his own judgements on us. I started by regretting this, but gradually I came to prefer it. Jenkins is thorough, and we are taken methodically through who did what and said what. Churchill's more spectacular clangers -the Dardanelles in WWI, the Gold Standard, the Abdication, his ludicrous views on Indian independence - are set in context without preaching. Whatever made Churchill great, it wasn't consistency of judgment. What should make this book mandatory reading for those who take a simplistic view of the lead-up to WWII is Jenkins's flat account of the matter. I started by wanting him to take a view on what constituted `appeasement' (a slogan if there was ever one) but I prefer Jenkins's way. The trick with Churchill was to harness that volcano of energy to the right cause, and I guess we were lucky. Chamberlain, not Churchill, declared war on Germany. Munich was not very dignified, but Britain was rearming under Chamberlain and needed to play for time. Going to war when we did was none too overdue, and I wonder whether Churchill might not have blown it by bulldog-at-a-gate reaction.

What makes a politician `great'? Luck and PR for the most part, I'd say. Churchill was an outsize personality. He had a terrific gift of phrase, he could dominate, but above all he could talk everyone into acquiescence. That kind of acquiescence doesn't last long, and Jenkins's nicely-judged assessments of this or that speech are probably more significant to Jenkins as another speech-maker than to most of us. A lot of so-called `leadership' is really just a holding operation - don't fall flat on your face even once. Churchill had a job to do, it was a job he wanted, he had the energy for it, and could he ever talk. The British public were not overawed with his oratory, they just felt it was up to what the occasion called for. He didn't fight the war, they did. They felt they owed him nothing, and they owed him nothing.

The book is a bit of a marathon, I'm sorry to say. Jenkins was no mean talker, in particular he was a devastating parliamentary debater. He is an excellent biographer if this is anything to go by, he is probably a good historian, but he is a downright bad writer. I would not have expected occasional bad grammar, bad syntax and misuse of words from such an aesthete, but they're here. He has a tin ear for English, particularly adverbs - `possibly excessively' `friendlily' and (dear God) `deadenly'. Such adverbs read to me uglily and ungainlily. Would `an united...' or `an horrendous...' pass in an English exam? If I were the examiner, not, er, an hope. Use of nouns and names as adjectives is an Americanism that doesn't suit him, but he uses it ad nauseam, and when it comes to the like of `an appealing (to Churchill) Texan companion' or `the then only seven-year-old redbrick and brown terracotta Midland Hotel' the entire English-speaking community should rise up in revolt.

At Fulton MO Churchill proposed an English-speaking alliance to outweigh his so-called Iron Curtain that he had negotiated in the first place. Stalin's response was obvious, and mine would have been the same in Stalin's place. Even dictators can talk sense, and Churchill got inebriated with his own verbosity, yet this is one sort of thing that he is supposed to be `great' for. Jenkins was a liberal-minded social democrat and his calm view of what caused so much excitement and worse should be a corrective to much that we are seeing today. If only he had said it better.