Instead he imbued the war effort with his own constant mantra of “K.B.O.” - Keep Buggering On. Churchill, though “burdened by defeats, his sensitivities scuffed by the increasing backbiting of backbenchers” and public war-weariness, never flinched. “Britain stood alone in twilight, awaiting the seemingly inevitable descent of darkness.” Although British forces repelled a German invasion that summer, the years 1940-42 would see them endure one humiliation after another. “The Führer’s Reich now basked in a splendorous Alpine dawn born of barbarity, deceit and sheer Teutonic will,” Reid notes. He was a multifarious individual, including within one man a whole troupe of characters, some of them subversive of one another and none feigned.”Īs Volume 3 opens, the situation facing Churchill and Britain could hardly have been more treacherous. “Yet though all saw him, all did not see him alike. “The gravity of his role was obvious,” Reid suggests. Roosevelt, his greatness makes him elusive.
The result is “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm 1940-1965,” a 1,000-plus-page study of Churchill’s life from his appointment as prime minister in 1940 until his death in 1965.Ĭhurchill is the most commanding British statesman of the modern era, but as with his World War II contemporary Franklin D.
In 2003, eight months before he died, Manchester handed over his Churchill research to Paul Reid, then a Palm Beach Post reporter, and asked him to finish the book. “Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years,” he said, “and I can’t do it anymore.” The second volume of William Manchester’s best-selling life of Winston Churchill, published in 1988, left the newly appointed British prime minister in May 1940 standing on the verge of his “finest hour.” Manchester began work on the third and final volume, but the project was halted in 1998 when he suffered two strokes.
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