Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Bio, If A bit Long & Dense....
Review: But dealing with this subject, 1000 pages may not really be too long! This is probably among the top three of WSC bios, along with Michael Gilbert, and Wm. Manchester's LAST LION (my personal favorite). It covers every aspect of the great man's adult life, the indisputable genius, with a few warts, especially the well known Dardonelles disaster, and the 1940 Norway campaign, being outfoxed and outgunned by the Germans. And the post-war years are also covered, including WSC's famous, cheap shots at the opposing Labor leader Atlee. Also, this is among the few WSC bios that give full credit to his very talented outside interests, especially painting, and shows some fine color pics of WSC's artwork. All in all ,a masterful job, even if a bit long at times!
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Book but Maybe a Bit Heavy Going
Review: I do not want to get into the accuracy of this book since I am not a Churchill scholar, or comment on if it is political or fair etc. Let us just say as a reviewer I am an average reader. I have read many books where Churchill was the author. Now the tables are turned and the book is about Churchill. It certainly gives a different perspective of the man and all his weaknesses as a human with a politician's ego. It is good to make one point to put the book in context. I have read that there are over 65 biographies in print on Churchill. So the idea that one might read the present book is motivated in part because it covers his personal life and it is written by a fellow politician, even if he was not in the same party - a liberal/socialist writing about a conservative. As a book I found it a bit heavy going. It is 1000 pages long and could be a bit shorter. It does not flow well or hold the reader. It took me a year to read the book. I would read 100-200 pages at a time and lose interest for a while and then go back. Would I buy the book again? Yes because it is a unique book with lots of details. It is a workmanship like job even if it is a bit too long. Four stars. Jack in Toronto
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I found this book to be a difficult read--and even more difficult to finish. There are parts that stick out as great tales of Winston Chuchill. But overall there are simply too many details. Unless you are student of British politics there are probably better books to read on this historical figure.
Rating:
Summary: A most thorough and engaging biography
Review: Jenkins does Churchill and history much justice in this thorough and detailed biography. Those unfamiliar with British parlimentary history from the mid-19th Century to Churchill's death may be a bit befuddled -- Asquith, Gladstone, George ... all those names! -- but it does not spoil the richness of the history. Jenkins explores Churchill's large ego, his political machinations, and his determination to save the western world. Churchill was a man of many faults and an overlarge sense of his place in the world, but he also succeeded in marshaling the West to fight the great threat of Nazi tyranny. In some sense, the United States would not be the country it is today had Churchill not first steeled the British people to hang in there. This is a long book, but a worthwhile endeavor. It's certainly better and more enlightening to read this 900 pages than the ones Bill Clinton wrote, I believe.
Rating: 
Summary: Avoid This Book Like The Plague
Review: Jenkins is a fine writer and deeply knowledgable about England, parliament in particular and Churchill but this is a perverse biography which is of use for only one group of people: those readers whose main interest is Churchill's parliamentary career as written by an insider. For the rest of us this book tantalizes and then frustrates. It jumps over (or omits) the most dramatic episodes of the story to give us nauseating detail about parliamentary debates that only a super-specialist would want to know about. This would be fine if we got such detail about everything else but no- only about parliamentary debates. I mean he describes who spoke first, second third and what their history in parliament was. But about Churchill's childhood and its influence - hardly a word and the word is dismissive. About his marriage to his wife - glimpses. We are told she was always away on trips but Jenkins refuses to venture an opinion as to why or even what Churchill's reaction was. It is almost as if his manners are too good to do anything other than talk about what happens in the public arena. I would strongly recommend this book only to academics(or amateurs) who have an interest in the history of the British House of Commons and Churchill's place in it. Don't let some of these previous reviews fool you. These reviewers are justly impressed with Jenkins gravitas and his age (he died before the book came out)and his political career and don't want to tell you the truth.
Rating:
Summary: Quite readable, nicely done
Review: Jenkins, a history professor and Member of Parliament himself as well as the author of an acclaimed bio of Gladstone, presents a fine biography of Britain's greatest 20th century figure. His own experiences uniquely qualify him to describe Churchill's political fortunes and maneuverings, although the American reader may find the Teens and Twenties either slow going or not sufficiently illuminating of Britain's odd political system, wherein politicians regularly shopped around for a district to represent, even after being defeated in another. This is a fairly traditional public and political bio, not a psychoanalysis (not to imply that Churchill HAD much of a personal life to expose), and moves along at a surprisingly good clip despite its 900-plus pages. Jenkins fully reminds us that Churchill basically earned his living as a writer -- the contracts, writing schedules, and royalties are carefully recorded -- though politics was his avocation. The author writes cleanly and engagingly, though he seems inordinately fond of unnecessarily unusual words like "psephological" and "rumbustious." On the other hand, his wit is dry and regularly in evidence. The U.S. hardcover edition by Farrar, Straus & Giroux is clean until about the halfway point, whereupon one begins to encounter "Feburary" (436), "replies hardly every being allowed" (553) "shore up the the" (706), "dimayed" (721), "The opposition could chose when to relax" (837-8), and similar infelicities. All in all, Jenkins seems to strike a nice balance between a healthy respect for his subject and a clear eye for Churchill's weaknesses, changes of direction, and occasional seizures of dishonesty. Well illustrated with more than 90 b&w photos.
Rating:
Summary: The scope of Manchester's work but more succint &
Review: marginally better. This unabridged audio version of Jenkins book came in two parts, part one slightly longer. It takes Churchill's life to 1940. Manchester's volume 1 "Visions of Glory "takes us to 1932, the beginning of "the wilderness years".
Over all Manchester's book is longer. Jenkin's book doesn't dwell on Churchill's childhood or his parents Jenny & Randolf. That's a plus. Jenkin's reader, Robert Whitfield does a passable imitation, without the lisp. Churchill also mumbled & muttered much of the time. Mr. Whitfield, thankfully, does not. Jenkins does cover Churchill's early military & journalistic career well. However, both authors seem to stint a bit on Churchill's opposition to dominion status for India. Jenkins does a little better with Churchill's relationship with the disgraced Prince of Wales & his strained relationship with Georg IV.
Jenkins had some advantages as an insider being an MP during the last years of Churchill's life. He had resources at his disposal maybe Manchester didn't have. Plus his book is much newer by about 12 years.
Jenkins starts by providing a primer on terms,concepts & traditions peculiar to the British & their way of governing that American readers might not be familiar with.
If you are interested in Churchill you have or you must read or listen to these two great biographies. You won't be bored. I give the edge to Jenkins.
Rating:
Summary: monumental tome
Review: Naturally a man of the stature and importance of Winston Churchill deserves more than one biography, and this one by Roy Jenkins is impressive in its own way, because evidently a huge amount of research has gone into it. But therein lies a problem - one suspects that the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead who died on January 5, 2003 was reluctant to leave any of the hard-won information out. This makes it rather heavy going for the most part. I could never imagine reading this book through in one or even several sittings. It is more for dipping into from time to time.
Ian Ruxton, co-author of "Japanese Students at Cambridge University in the Meiji Era", also available here on amazon.com.
Rating:
Summary: Packed With Knowledge!
Review: Perhaps the greatest tribute to the work of author Roy Jenkins is that, at times, he seemed to know what Winston Churchill was actually thinking - and you're pretty sure he's right. When the mind you're reading about belongs to perhaps the greatest Prime Minister in the history of Great Britain, Nobel-prize winner Winston Churchill, that is a pretty impressive accomplishment. Jenkins' biography is essentially unsentimental, and reveals Churchill's idiosyncrasies and errors in an honest manner that serves only to elevate, rather than tarnish, the legacy of the man who rallied the free world to resist the tyranny of National Socialism. Jenkins has written an extraordinary volume which we highly recommends to any student of history.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and detailed - maybe too much so
Review: There is a reason why most biographies of Churchill either concentrate on only a portion of his life or are split into multiple volumes. Here, Jenkins goes against that trend and, for better or worse, demonstrates why his comprehensive, single-volume biography is the exception to the rule. For the most part, his change is for the better, although students of Churchill's early life and/or his late career are likely to be disappointed. Jenkins, himself a former Labour MP whose service overlapped with the tail end of his subject's, demonstrates a remarkable degree of firsthand knowledge of British politics during and just after World War II and an even more impressive collection of research on Churchill's early career as a politician, writer and adventurer. Anyone with an interest in any particular issue Churchill ever worked with is likely to find a wealth of information and analysis to work with here. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of information Jenkins wishes to impart sometimes becomes detrimental to the book's readability, as tangential analyses of a trip, an election, or even a single Parliamentary debate can drag on for pages at a time so that the reader is likely to have forgotten the chapter's primary subject by the time Jenkins returns to it. On the other hand, his dry English wit (he argues, for example, that Churchill's 1931 car accident in New York "cannot be too easily attributed to the perverse habit of the Americans of driving on the right") provides a good antidote to some of the slower passages. This shortcoming fades considerably as the book progresses; not surprisingly, Jenkins is far more articulate when discussing events of which he has a personal recollection, which he often shares in footnotes. The book's only other shortcoming is a degree of unevenness in the amount and focus of attention on different periods of Churchill's life. It is, of course, more than reasonable to devote more ink to the World War II years than to any other time, but seven chapters on the relatively uneventful (for Churchill) 1930s versus fourteen pages on the final decade of his life is less justifiable. Also, his childhood and education are barely touched upon at all, an odd omission for a book that features minutiae down to what Churchill ate on a particular flight to Washington or Moscow later in life. This is understandable in that the book is essentially a political biography that also includes more personal details when Jenkins has them and when they fit in well with the subject at hand, but it is unclear whether that was Jenkins' real intention. Those who are interested only in Churchill's life outside of his work (to the limited extent that he had one!) should look elsewhere. But for a sweeping assessment and critique of modern Britain's greatest leader, including his failures as well as his triumphs, this is as good as one is likely to find in fewer than 1,000 pages.
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