This is a biography of Churchill as a soldier and war leader, and does not pretend to cover his other personas as politician and writer. It is the first book I have read that provides both the undeniable genius, and the personality flaws of the man. It balances both of these points of view. It shows Churchill as both a Victorian romantic with a "swords and bayonets" view of warfare--and as a visionary and extraordinarily powerful leader who saved Britain and perhaps the world from Hitler. As D'Este says, perhaps Churchill was the only person alive who could have kept Britain in the fight between the fall of France and the entry of America into WW II some 18 months later. This book does not pretend to cover Churchill's political career--read Roy Jenkins for that. Nor does it pretend to cover the entire life of the man--Manchester did that in his first two volumes. What the book does extraordinarily well is to show both the indispensable leader and the petulant narcissist that co-existed within Churchill.
As Bob Dylan said, "Hero's a nuisance to live with at home." Churchill was certainly that--unbelievably vain, self-centered, demanding everyone change their lives' schedules to keep up with his nocturnal habits, interfering with generals at every turn. He also insisted on finding generals who would fight, rather than just be good British club buddies--and this likely turned around the war.
D'Este often argues that Churchill was a strategic disaster. That his intense focus on the Mediterranean was strategically a mistake and led to the horrid war of attrition in Italy. There is another point of view on this matter. Having read Churchill's own 6 volume memoir of the war, I have reason to believe that rather than being a strategic disaster, Churchill was focused on what Europe would look like after Hitler's defeat, and was proposing anything he could conceive of that would prevent Stalinist Russia from dominating the Balkans and Central Europe. He was likely wrong that the war could have been won by thrusting troops towards Vienna through the Ljubljana gap--but it was not lack of strategic vision here, but of minimizing the difficulties of mountain warfare. Had the Balkan and Vienna strategy worked, there might never have been a Cold War.
I must disagree with other reviewers who found the book uneven and poorly organized. I think the scholarship here was impeccable. I have rarely read a book where the quotations from the memoirs and diaries of others were so deeply researched, and flowed so appropriately into the text. The book reads easily and engrossingly. It does what it set out to do--reviews the life of Churchill as warrior, with impressive scholarship and compelling reading. What more can one want from a book?
That said, there are a few historical errors that peeved me. It might not make a difference to persons who have not done a great deal of WW II reading. But, to me, calling the Hood and the Repulse 'battleships' rather than 'battlecruisers' grated and was inaccurate. They were more vulnerable precisely because they were never designed to take on a battleship but to be faster than any ship that they might encounter, and less heavily armored--and thus more easily sunk. Similarly, several times D'Este says that the German offensive in 1940 was a repeat of their plan in 1914, which it most adamantly was not. The whole idea was to deceive the French and British to believe they were repeating the Schlieffen plan of 1914, and then to sucker punch the French through the Ardennes, after French and British forces moved north to defend the Belgian frontier. I imagine D'Este had to make some compromises of space to cover everything he did, but these inaccuracies bothered me. Can I give it 4 and 1/2 stars?
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