Anyone who attends a conclave of Churchill groupies and endures the endless paeans to the great man who “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle” will inevitably be seized by the urge to shout “It wasn't that simple!” Give thanks, then, to Richard Toye for acting on that impulse. As the author of Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007), Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made (2010), and most recently Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction (2013), he is superbly qualified to dissect Winston Churchill's wartime oratory. And to that worked-over subject he brings two keenly original insights.

First, Toye understands that the author is not dead, but he never works alone. Literary scholars have become increasingly aware that literary texts are shaped in part by individuals whose names do not appear on the cover. That much became evident when Toye compared drafts of Churchill's speeches, which often incorporated suggestions from others. Before he said it to the House of Commons, he tried out the phrase “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat” on Leo Amery and Malcolm MacDonald, as if they were a focus group. It was actually Neville Chamberlain who persuaded Churchill to make his first broadcast as prime minister on 19 May 1940, as German armored spearheads were approaching the English Channel. Chamberlain even proposed a few sentences that Churchill adopted, which may explain why the speech was not very inspiring.

The far more effective “Never Surrender” speech of 4 June reflected input from Anthony Eden, Archibald Sinclair, Duff Cooper, South African prime minister Jan Christian Smuts, and (perhaps most influential of all) US journalist William Philip Simms. As foreign editor of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, Simms knew that isolationists back home were arguing that Britain was already beaten, but he also recognized that American audiences responded to “bold, posterish effects.” Therefore, he urged, “The proposition is simple: It is whether the kind of world we know in . . . Britain and the Americas is to survive, or whether most of the progress made by human kind since the Dark Ages is to be wiped out. For her part Britain intends to fight until Germany's power for evil has been broken. Give in—NEVER!” (49). It is a remarkable discovery on Toye's part, though tracking down sources of literary inspiration is a tricky business. Churchill's ringing phrases can be traced back much further, to Georges Clemenceau rallying the French during the First World War.

Beyond that, Toye focuses on Churchill's audiences, who did not always receive his words with enthusiasm. John Lukacs attempted that in The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill & Hitler (1990), but The Roar of the Lion is by far the broadest and most detailed reception history of Churchill's war speeches. There is no lack of source material: British wartime morale was under constant surveillance by the Ministry of Information, Mass Observation, and the Gallup Poll. Toye relies primarily on more than two hundred daily diaries kept by ordinary citizens for Mass Observation, a sample that is somewhat skewed to the political left and may therefore overrepresent grousers. On the other hand, respondents could have been reluctant to tell pollsters what they really thought of Churchill, for fear of seeming defeatist. It may be that the most accurate reflection of the public mood were the conversations overheard and reported by Mass Observers. But all the same, Toye's focus on the skeptics is useful as a corrective, and he is careful to warn that they may not have been typical. Diarists also have one important advantage over opinion polls: they can explain in some detail why they thought Churchill was talking rot.

Having independently researched some of the same territory myself, I conclude that Toye is generally on target. Churchill's words boosted public confidence up to a point, but that tonic quickly wore off in the face of bad war news. The real turnaround in morale was affected by the destruction of the French fleet at Oran on 4 July: that, more than any speeches, convinced the world that Churchill would never give in.

More broadly, Toye tracks the reaction to Churchill's oratory throughout the world – in the Dominions, France, Italy, Japan, China, India, the United States (where the British Embassy monitored the media), and, of course, Germany (where the SS Sicherheitsdienst monitored everyone). Churchill was mindful of his global audience, impressively so in his 22 June 1941 broadcast offering aid to the Soviet Union. Acknowledging his long record of anti-Bolshevism, he framed the war as a patriotic Russian struggle against Nazi invaders. It involved some rhetorical maneuvering, but as George Orwell granted, “he has to speak to the whole world, e.g. to middle-western Americans, airmen and naval officers, disgruntled shopkeepers and farmers, and also to the Russians themselves, as well as to the leftwing political parties” (105). Toye's evidence suggests that, in a tour de force, Churchill touched all those bases.

Toye concludes with Churchill's notorious 1945 election broadcast, when he warned that a Socialist government in Britain would inevitably “fall back on some form of Gestapo” (199). Here he perceives the influence of F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, though I think the speech owed more to Sinclair Lewis's dystopian novel It Can't Happen Here. Toye fairly notes that Labour politicians (including Clement Attlee) were no less reckless in sticking Fascist labels on their opponents, but when Churchill dropped to that level, he destroyed his prestige as a truly national leader. And as this book makes clear, that was not the first time that Churchill lost his audience.