At some point in the late 1990s a friend sent me a copy of William Manchester’s The Last Lion. A biography of Winston Churchill, it read like a fiction novel so remarkable was the man. Detail after detail of extraordinary wit, bravery, and memory. The last part sounds strange, or out of place, but this real person whose actual life read like a Steven Spielberg film could commit to verbatim memory pages and pages of writing by the greats.
Manchester’s book was unputdownable, I quickly purchased Part II of The Last Lion not long after beginning Part I, and it too was an amazing read. Its subtitle was Alone, and it chronicled Churchill’s time in the proverbial political wilderness. As some may or may not know, Churchill’s deeply held view that Adolf Hitler represented a threat of the existential kind was in no way the consensus in the 1930s. Hopefully this explains the subtitle. The main thing is that both books were spectacular reads. I came away from them eager to read more about Churchill, and have.
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