As he writes, his mentor “was not an academic. Reid has done a superb job of creating a book that reads like Manchester. At the time, only a tenth of the more than 1,000 pages had been written. Before he died in 2004, he handed the book over to his friend Paul Reid, a journalist. Manchester had essentially completed the research by 1998, but then ill health made writing impossible. In truth, however, it’s a book about Churchill’s war. “The Last Lion,” the third installment of William Manchester’s biography of Churchill, starts in 1940, when he became prime minister, and ends with his death in 1965. How strange, then, that such a corpulent tome has so much missing. The similarity goes further: Rather like Churchill, this book is very fat. “The Last Lion” is a majestic saga in the Victorian style - vivid, articulate, beautifully composed, grand in scope but thin on introspection. The latest biography of Churchill has much in common with the man himself. He had an enormous personality but a simplistic outlook: He saw the past as a collection of heroic tales immune to analysis. Winston Churchill was an old-fashioned hero - majestic, eloquent, effusive, addicted to drama.
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