In The Artful Dickens, his recent study, John Mullan says of Dombey and Son that “Once sucked into the plot of this novel, no character can escape” (The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist, 2020). The same appears to be true of the recuperations of Winston Churchill: the moment anyone determines to portray Churchill, historians included, the mythic force-field of Churchill asserts itself, and authors experience their prose bending to take on a life of its own, drawing the writers into a programmed, irresistible narrative not of their own making. Those who seek determinedly to address the authority of mythic Churchill find that, when they are looking elsewhere, somehow or other they get tangled up in a mental landscape they cannot escape.

The same is true, but generally more so, for writers who actively hate Churchill—the person and the myth—and who endeavor to blow him out of the water, demonstrating at every turn his bad faith and comprehensive odiousness. In a fateful paradox, at every point their very antagonism is governed by what they despise. Turning iconic Churchill upside-down too easily turns into a kind of perverse affirmation of the power of exactly what they seek to destroy. Mythic Churchill inhabits us all, whether we wish it or not.

It turns on a matter of degree. There is much, too much of course, that Anglophone historians in the early twenty-first century unthinkingly act out, without ever quite appreciating those elements of our practice which stubbornly continue to remain unquestioned. Engaging with what is otherwise naturalized does not come easily. The larger backdrop to the current outbreak of the history wars, fierce and intemperate as they have become, demonstrates that the stakes are high. But historians worth their salt know that an inquiring mind is what allows history, as a mental practice, to work. Historical reasoning is obliged to interrogate what otherwise stands unquestioned. This is, largely, why we spend so much of our time studying history. After all, a history which tells us what we already know is hardly worth anyone’s painstaking labor.

It takes much effort to overcome inherited naturalized instincts, requiring the critical self-consciousness which history calls for. In the wider world, we can point to torrents of invocations of Churchill-unthought. Some are relatively mild, some are more dangerous. Allen Packwood’s collection cannot be free from this dilemma. That’s the cost of choosing Churchill as an object of study. Even so, the twenty-one essays collected here are all revealing. It is a graceful collection, struggling hard to free Churchill the man from Churchill the myth. The volume is far from unthought and works hard to banish mythological Churchill as the incarnation of England’s virtue.

I suspect that the collection was never designed to be read from cover to cover in one go. However, obliged as I was to the Journal of British Studies, this is how I was required to read it. In doing so, I learned much: the book covers a great deal of ground in an accommodating and lucid prose. Inevitably, I found myself spending more time on some essays rather than others. This has little to do with the quality of the respective essays. What draws me to Churchill this time around will not be the same on my next reading. To say this as neutrally as possible, the essays which grabbed me the most were Peter Clarke’s “Churchill as Writer and Orator;” Niamh Gallagher on “Churchill, the ‘Irish Question’ and the Irish;” and Richard Toye’s “Churchill and the ‘United States of Europe’.”

Clarke offers a material substratum to the makings of mythic Churchill and delivers eye-popping information on the colossal earnings that Churchill himself received from his writings. He tells an extraordinary story. On the one hand he demonstrates the degree to which Churchill himself was complicit in creating the myths which surrounded him. On the other, at the same time, he saw huge sums rolling into his bank. Clarke provides a dramatic account of Churchill’s enormous reserves of energy. For sure, from the 1930s he increasingly called upon cohorts of paid assistants to do the hard labor, such that he ended life directing history as if it were a Fordist enterprise, with a crew of anonymous drones following the orders of the writer-in-chief. Even so, his writing itself represents a mighty achievement.

Gallagher on Ireland, and Toye’s subtle unraveling of Churchill’s shifting commitments to an idea of Europe as a political entity, are exemplary in that they affirm history, less as a concern with “the past,” but more as a way of thinking the constantly changing relations between the past and the present. As history moves, so inevitably do the figures of Churchill themselves shape-shift. The volume is at its best when the issues of our own times are made explicit, and the multitude of Churchills we confront are explained as, in part, a consequence of the shifting historical configurations of our own histories.

Analytically, I think this is the dominating intention that underwrites the overall collection. Allen Packwood suggests that this is so in his introduction, “Who Was Winston Churchill?;” in his substantive essay on “Churchill as War Leader;” and in his closing conclusion, “Where Next for Winston Churchill?” Rather than opting for a definitive statement, in which everything is cut and dried and the book arrives at its predestined closure, he makes clear his allegiance to a tactic through which Churchill himself continues to be a question. In this way, Churchill is envisaged as a “doubled” figure, in which he embodies in the single person the virtues and vices that animated him. In following this line of argument, Packwood demonstrates the value of historians living with, and learning from, the simultaneous co-existence of contrary ways of reasoning.