Word: warred
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What will historians say about Winston Churchill a hundred years from now? The question is pertinent -- inescapable, in fact, because nearly a quarter- century after his death, we may remain too close to make an accurate judgment. Of all the larger-than-life figures of World War II -- Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini -- Churchill remains the hardest to assess. Rarely has a great leader been so often right. Or so often wrong...
...second volume of William Manchester's projected triple-decker biography covers the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, when Churchill was indisputably right. Out of power and derided as a crank, he sounded the alarm about the terrible plot being hatched inside Hitler's deranged mind. The story is familiar, but, told with skill and vivid anecdotes by Manchester, it continues to shock and horrify. Four times, by Churchill's count, firm action could have stopped Hitler without a shot's being fired; four times Britain's leaders, along with their counterparts in France, ignored...
...even then Hitler had influential admirers in London, and without Churchill's fierce spirit and dominating personality, it is quite possible that Britain would have made peace with him, perhaps changing the outcome of the war and modern history...
...story is carried on through Churchill's 1945 defeat at the polls, the writing of his war memoirs, his second term at 10 Downing Street in the early '50s and, finally, his death at 90 in 1965. Gilbert's is the official biography, a day-by-day chronological account that seems to leave out nothing important and includes much that is not. Looked at on its own terms, it is an admirable monument to the great man, meticulously researched, scrupulously documented and well -- or well enough -- written...
...with "a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain." As Manchester aptly observes, Churchill and his archenemy Hitler were alike in more ways than either would have cared to admit: both were brilliant orators capable of inspiring millions; both possessed wills of almost superhuman intensity; and both were meddlesome war leaders who constantly second-guessed their generals and set back their causes as often as they advanced them...