Free Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers by Shashi Tharoor

survival.” That victory, as Charmley has pointed out, resulted in the dissolution of the British Empire and, more immediately, in Churchill's own defenestration by the war-weary British electorate in the elections of 1945. But Churchill cheerfully said that history would judge him kindly because he intended to write it himself. (The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes he authored on the war led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to give him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill's self-justifying embellishments.)
    To be fair to Jenkins, his authoritatively researched, marvelously written tome goes well beyond the words to paint an inspired portrait of the man who straddled the great events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here is Churchill the cavalryman of the Boer War and the Sudan campaign, Churchill the defiant bulldog who kept the British in World War II when so many of the establishment wanted peace, and Churchill the parliamentarian of rapier wit who dominated its politics at a time when Britain was the epicenter of a worldwide empire. At the end of his research, Jenkins, a highly regarded biographer of Herbert Henry Asquith and William E. Gladstone, concludes: “When I started writing this book I thought that Gladstone was, by a narrow margin, the greater man, certainly the more remarkable specimen of humanity. In the course of writing it I changed my mind. I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”
    I do think that Jenkins makes the best case that can be made for this conclusion, but he conceded, when I asked him directly, that Churchill's greatness was deeply flawed by two major failings. One was his disastrous judgment on military matters, going back to the horrendous defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, a plan he hatched when first lord of the Admiralty, and reflected again in Norway in 1940, as well as in his decision to delay the planned 1943 invasion of Europe in favor of a pointless diversionary campaign in North Africa in 1942 (which in turn led inevitably to the great Alliedlosses in Italy, where the topography overwhelmingly favored the defenders). Jenkins addresses these errors un-sparingly. The second major failing, which Jenkins does not adequately address in his book, was that Churchill's notions of freedom and democracy, his defense of which led
Time
magazine to hail him as the “Man of the Century,” faltered at the frontiers of empire. My blood still boils when I hear teary-eyed British friends describe him as a great fighter for freedom, when I know him principally as a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of nonwhite peoples, a man who fought to deny us freedom. (And he did so with a pettiness that cannot be excused on grounds of policy: after presiding over one of the worst famines in human history, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, while ordering the diversion of food from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies, Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about the people perishing in the famine was to ask peevishly why Gandhi hadn't died yet.)
    That story is not told in the Jenkins book; nor are the numerous other tales of Churchill's supremacist bigotry. When I asked Jenkins about this, his answer was honest: Churchill, he admitted bluntly, “was a racialist.” It is, alas, a judgment that does not figure in the book, but Lord Jenkins's candor and willingness to qualify his own admiration of his subject is testimony to his intellectual integrity. In his egotistical, arrogant, and unsympathetic inability to rise above the crippling prejudices of the