Meanwhile...

Early in the morning and late at night, I kept on reading the World Crisis, Winston Churchill's account of the First World War, easily the most vivid, eloquent, moving  and penetrating history of that great conflict which I ever read. Much less known than "The Second World War, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is by far a better book. Whereas the former is (except the first volume, "The Gathering Storm") largely the product of staff work, overloaded with documents and often dull, this is a rolling, majestic, impassioned book, its tone by turns acerbic and heroic, which illuminates and brings to life episodes, characters and moods often described to no effect by plodding academic pens. A devastating indictment of the trench warfare waged on the Western Front, with its mindless offensives costing hundreds of thousands of lives, a spirited defense of the Dardanelles operation which nearly cost him his career, an account of how he invented the tank (he did) and so much more. Long out of print, it has now been republished by Penguin.