Customer Reviews
Essential - By: Robin Pain, 11 Aug 2007 
You might expect history written by the Master of the English language who also made some of it to be better placed than anyone, ever. He does not disappoint - it flows smoothly covering huge expanses of time & complex eventsin an engaging way.
He sticks absolutely to the point - power. The flow of political power. The actor's characters are deftly sketched to show their motivation & the so the whole thing comes alive & you read it like a novel, except you have to go slowly because so much is packed into each page.
Time & again the same themes emerge. Politics is inherently dirty. Good guys don't win (never give a sucker an even break) but neither do bad guys. Bad guys always fair worse if they break-the-code. In fact it seems that it is almost necessary for some extreme atrocity to occur before any period of stability.
This is how the book affected me. It made me think. Modern wars are not short-sighted, they are non-sighted. It took an amazing length of time & blood for the English government to so painfully, slowly, evolve.
I smiled at his dry comment on deteriorating behaviour during the wars of the roses "...followed by the now customary beheadings..."
You marvel with him on the courage of the chap who nailed the anti-Richard 111 doggerel on the door of the cathedral (and was presumably nailed to some other door by the king a year later - my words - Churchill avoids gruesome detail here but his allusion to it is the more menacing).
The prose is fantastic, so colourful, punchy & short & so original line after line. And I only needed the dictionary a few times! (to plash)
I am useless at Shakespeare but I understand Churchill's semantics/syntax first time, every time.
He playfully chides academic's "Bodicca" preferring "Boadicea". That's Churchill for you, a man of the people.
I picked up a copy of Simon Scharmer at the library (I quite enjoyed the TV series) read a paragraph, & then re-read some of it again & left it alone - too flowery & heavy a style. I don't have time to learn a new language.
As good as you would expect - By: , 10 Jan 2003 
Mr Churchill has taken on a huge subject & dealt with it fantastically. The speed of the book is just right & it is written with a feel & expression of ideas that I wasn't expecting.
The best point to note though is that he offers his own opinion on many occasions so you not only get a thoughtful perspective of history you also get an incite into a great man's view of other notable figuresin English history.
