Going to Pieces
Churchill’s Shadow: An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy , The Bodley Head, 2021, 624 pages, £25. ISBN 978–1847925732
This book literally fell to pieces in my hands. As I turned the pages they came adrift from the binding, and I ended up with a clutch of loose leaves between hard covers. I soon found, too, that the text is marred by a rash of small errors, insignificant in themselves but together casting doubt on the author’s reliability. Geoffrey Wheatcroft repeatedly says, for example, that the official biography of Winston Churchill, begun by his
