His command of language was such that he was a recipient of the Nobel prize in literature. I say this as a sceptic who, although publicly critical of the man and deeply wary of the myths that surround him, named my production company, Uplands, after a phrase taken from his most famous wartime speech (“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands”). Like the lines of Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time”, some of Churchill’s more lyrical passages are so perfectly constructed and deftly targeted that they can induce, even in sceptics, momentary lapses of critical analysis. Are we able, more than five decades after his death, to peer over the mountain of his reputation and his writings – more than 40 books and thousands of speeches – and find the real man?Īs well as the size of Churchill’s output, there is the seductive eloquence of his words. Yet it was their leader who, despite being born at the height of the late Victorian phenomenon of the stiff upper-lip, and into the upper class that was supposed to exemplify it best, was constantly crying in public, and fully deserved Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson’s nickname for him: ‘Cry-Baby’.H ow to assess the career of a world-changing politician who was also a prolific journalist, writer and incessant self-publicist? Aside from his other achievements, Winston Churchill wrote a six-volume, 1.9m-word account of the second world war and his role in winning it. Of course WW2, with what he called the “climacterics” of the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, D-Day, VE-Day and so on, was an emotional time for most Britons. This can be measured in the number of times that contemporaries noted that he dissolved into tears. If anything, Churchill became more emotional the older he got. But in fact the opposite seems to have been the case.
Aged 65 when he became prime minister for the first time, one might have imagined that "the passion of former days", as he was later to call it, would have cooled in him, to be replaced by a calmer analytical reasoning.
But Churchill was a profoundly emotional man, far more than any of his War Cabinet colleagues. To an extent that was truly extraordinary in someovene responsible for the overall direction of British forces. Despite personifying Britain's defiance of the Nazis during the Second World War, Winston Churchill burst into tears dozens of times during that conflict.
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