![]() Jenkins’ book was an elegant tour-de-force of interpretation, but based almost entirely on his reading of the existing published sources, shrewdly refracted through a lifetime’s experience of politics. If so, Roberts has risen magnificently to the challenge. (But Roberts is only fifty-five, so one wonders where he can go next.) On the other hand, Jenkins has held the field for seventeen years, so maybe it is time for a big new reassessment for a new generation. Roy Jenkins wrote the last major biography when he was nearly eighty on the back of an equally substantial life of Gladstone Roberts comes to him just four years after knocking off Napoleon. ![]() Can there really be anything new to discover or say? It is as if Churchill has become the Everest, which all biographers feel they must tackle before they hang up their pen, like great actors crowning their career by playing King Lear. ![]() ![]() ![]() Given his publisher’s claim that there have already been more than a thousand biographies of Churchill, not counting hundreds of specialist studies ranging from his war leadership to his taste in cigars, one’s first reaction to Andrew Roberts producing another thousand-page biography is incredulity. ![]()
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