The Last Lion; Winston Spencer Churchill. Alone, 1932-1940

Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1988. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. 756 pages, List of Illustrations. Illustrations. List of Maps. Maps. Author's Note. Endpaper chronology. Source Notes. Index. Some wear and small pieces missing to DJ edges. William Raymond Manchester (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) was an American author, biographer, and historian. He was the author of 18 books which have been translated into over 20 languages. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award. In 1947, Manchester went to work as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. There he met journalist H. L. Mencken, who became his friend and mentor, and also became the subject of Manchester's master's thesis and first book, Disturber of the Peace. The biography, published in 1951, profiles Mencken, the self-described "conservative anarchist" who made his mark as a writer, editor, and political pundit in the 1920s. In 1955, Manchester became an editor for Wesleyan University and the Wesleyan University Press and spent the rest of his career at the university. For the academic year 1959–1960, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan. He later became an adjunct professor of history, adjunct professor emeritus, and writer-in-residence at the university. His best-selling book, The Death of a President (1967), is a detailed account of the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, who had been the subject of an earlier book by Manchester. Manchester retraced the movements of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination and concluded that Oswald had acted alone. Volume II of Manchester's projected 3-volume biography of Winston Churchill. (Manchester died before completing the third volume; that volume was published in November 2012, completed by Paul Reid whom Manchester had selected before his death.) In this volume, the author argues that despite his personal and political troubles, Churchill managed to assemble a vast, underground intelligence network which provided him with more complete and accurate information on Germany's rearmament than the government was able to gather. Manchester also argues that MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain followed a policy of appeasement, believing that almighty German army would serve as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Derived from a Kirkus review: The second volume in Manchester's masterly three-part biography of Winston Churchill, which now limns as well as lionizes the aging Tory during his political exile. Sympathetically portrayed here as "the last of England's great Victorian statesmen" for his staunch defense of the empire and its values, Churchill did not beweep his outcast state. Though a parliamentary backbencher without ministerial portfolio, the sometime insider managed to stay remarkably well informed on Germany's secret rearmament and its territorial ambitions throughout the 1930's. Churchill spoke out forcefully in the House of Commons and wrote scores of articles against Hitler and the Nazi threat. Until the eleventh hour, though, he was a prophet largely without honor in his own country—and party. With anguished memories of the nation's WW I losses, the ruling Conservatives made appeasement a keystone of British foreign policy. But, while devoting detailed attention to where and how Churchill's contemporaries went wrong, Manchester does not overlook his subject's faults. For instance, Churchill's preparedness campaign suffered a serious setback when —with more loyalty than judgment—he espoused the cause of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. On balance, there were decidedly more credits than debits to his account during the gathering storm, and he became the moral equivalent of a consensus choice for Prime Minister after the onset of WW II. Manchester closes on a triumphant note: the May 19, 1940, radio address in which Churchill enjoined the British to brace for battle and "their finest hour." An eloquent and evenhanded appreciation.
Condition: Very good / fair.

Keywords: Winston Churchill, British Empire, Great Britain, Appeasement, Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Prime Ministers, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax, Samuel Hoare, Munich Agreement, Harold Nicolson

ISBN: 0316545120

[Book #42639]

Price: $50.00