The Churchill Series - Mar. 3, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

I recall a courtroom drama in which the lawyer I was rooting for said to the witness I knew was guilty: “Well then, if you never knew her, how do you explain this cancelled check, which I ask the court to admit in evidence? “

Richard M. Langworth, Churchill scholar and editor of The Churchil Centre’s quarterly journal, Finest Hour, gives us a kind of “cancelled check” courtroom moment in a review responding to critics of Churchill’s multi-volume history, The Second World War.

Langworth first tells us about a "witness" whom he calls an analyst:

Churchill's prose "could often be aversive [sic] to modern readers," wrote another recent analyst, and, by the time the books appeared, "the world had moved on into an exhausted flatness that had little to do with, and little time for, the high-flown attitudes and language of Churchillian rhetoric."

Then Langworth produces "the check:"

If that's so, why was The Second World War able to sell over 300,000 copies of each volume as it was published, millions since, eighteen translations into foreign languages, three major serializations and several million abridgements?

If that’s so indeed!

Enter Editor Langworth’s "check" into evidence.