Read Online The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 by William Manchester, Paul Reid - Free Book Online
Authors: William Manchester, Paul Reid
Tags: nonfiction, History, Biography & Autobiography, Retail, World War II, Military, Europe, Great Britain, Presidents & Heads of State
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emanating parochial grandeur like King David, and he also belonged to that rare species, the cultivated man of action, the engagé intellectual. Attlee said: “Energy and poetry… sum him up.” But nothing sums him up. He was too many people. If ever there was a Renaissance man, he was it. In the age of the specialist, he was the antithesis, our Leonardo. As a writer he was a reporter, novelist, essayist, critic, historian, and biographer. As a statesman he served, before becoming His Majesty’s first magistrate, as minister for the colonies and for trade, home affairs, finance, and all three of the armed forces. Away from his desk he was at various times an airplane pilot, artist, farmer, fencer, hunter, breeder of racehorses, polo player, collector of tropical fish, and shooter of wild animals in Africa. One felt he could do anything. That was why he seemed inevitable in 1940. Bernard Shaw said: “The moment we got a good fright, and had to find a man who could and would do something, we were on our knees to Winston Churchill.” 48
It is pointless to expect balance and consistency in genius. Churchill was not made like other men. Among his many traits was a kind of built-in shock absorber which permitted him to survive his repeated defeats and concomitant depressions. Going through his papers one is struck by his resilience, his pounding energy, his volatility, his dogged determination, and his utter lack of humility. He said: “I am not usually accused, even by my friends, of being of a modest or retiring disposition.” 49 In the thousands of photographs of his face you will find every expression but one. He never looked apologetic. He had the temperament of a robber baron. As Walter Bagehot said of Palmerston, “His personality was a power.” In World War I John Maynard Keynes singled out as his most striking virtue his intense concentration on the matter at hand—precisely the quality which, in the opinion of William James, identifies men of genius. In games he was a consistent winner. Like his distant cousin Douglas MacArthur, he was satisfied by nothing short of victory.
He was formidable, but he was also cherubic. That was what made him lovable even to those who recoiled from his benevolent despotism. He said, “All babies look like me.” They did, and he looked like, and sometimes acted like, them. He enjoyed a child’s anthropomorphism—finishing a book, he would put it aside and say: “I don’t want to see his face again.” His chief playthings were his seven-inch cigars, Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas. Most of the time they were unlit; he liked to chew and suck them anyway, and when an end grew soggy, he would fashion mouthpieces—“bellybandos,” he called them—from paper and glue. Mornings he worked in bed wearing a scarlet and green-dragon silk bed jacket, with papers strewn around him, and his play in the bath was an important part of his daily ritual; on long flights his luggage included a portable canvas bathtub. Dictating, or just puttering around his study, he wore a bright quilted dressing gown, which had been originally designed for a character playing Pooh-Bah in a production of
The Mikado,
and gold-embroidered slippers bearing his initials, a gift from Lady Diana Cooper. In his Siren Suit, Lady Diana recalls, he looked “exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks.” 50
He was the absolute romantic. His paintings reflect this. There are no monotones—each stroke of his brush added shimmering light and color. And everything he painted or wrote, his very gestures, was invested with emotionalism. “I’ve always been blubbery,” he said. No man wept more easily. His tears flowed at the mention of gallantry in battle, the thought of “invincible knights in olden days,” victims of anti-Semitism, Canadian loyalty to the Empire, the death of George VI, Elizabeth II’s kindnesses toward him, or the name of Franklin Roosevelt—“the best friend
It is pointless to expect balance and consistency in genius. Churchill was not made like other men. Among his many traits was a kind of built-in shock absorber which permitted him to survive his repeated defeats and concomitant depressions. Going through his papers one is struck by his resilience, his pounding energy, his volatility, his dogged determination, and his utter lack of humility. He said: “I am not usually accused, even by my friends, of being of a modest or retiring disposition.” 49 In the thousands of photographs of his face you will find every expression but one. He never looked apologetic. He had the temperament of a robber baron. As Walter Bagehot said of Palmerston, “His personality was a power.” In World War I John Maynard Keynes singled out as his most striking virtue his intense concentration on the matter at hand—precisely the quality which, in the opinion of William James, identifies men of genius. In games he was a consistent winner. Like his distant cousin Douglas MacArthur, he was satisfied by nothing short of victory.
He was formidable, but he was also cherubic. That was what made him lovable even to those who recoiled from his benevolent despotism. He said, “All babies look like me.” They did, and he looked like, and sometimes acted like, them. He enjoyed a child’s anthropomorphism—finishing a book, he would put it aside and say: “I don’t want to see his face again.” His chief playthings were his seven-inch cigars, Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas. Most of the time they were unlit; he liked to chew and suck them anyway, and when an end grew soggy, he would fashion mouthpieces—“bellybandos,” he called them—from paper and glue. Mornings he worked in bed wearing a scarlet and green-dragon silk bed jacket, with papers strewn around him, and his play in the bath was an important part of his daily ritual; on long flights his luggage included a portable canvas bathtub. Dictating, or just puttering around his study, he wore a bright quilted dressing gown, which had been originally designed for a character playing Pooh-Bah in a production of
The Mikado,
and gold-embroidered slippers bearing his initials, a gift from Lady Diana Cooper. In his Siren Suit, Lady Diana recalls, he looked “exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks.” 50
He was the absolute romantic. His paintings reflect this. There are no monotones—each stroke of his brush added shimmering light and color. And everything he painted or wrote, his very gestures, was invested with emotionalism. “I’ve always been blubbery,” he said. No man wept more easily. His tears flowed at the mention of gallantry in battle, the thought of “invincible knights in olden days,” victims of anti-Semitism, Canadian loyalty to the Empire, the death of George VI, Elizabeth II’s kindnesses toward him, or the name of Franklin Roosevelt—“the best friend
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