Yes, there are still things to learn about Churchill, as fine new biography reveals

Is "Churchill: Walking With Destiny" by Andrew Roberts the best Churchill biography of them all?

Who in their right mind would presume to say, short of Winston Churchill himself, who maintained, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”?

All Churchill biographies stand in the shadow of their subject and on the shoulders of Churchill’s official biographer, the late Sir Martin Gilbert, whose primary research constitutes the bulk of what we truly know.

In this sense, Roberts’ new biography (Viking, 982 pp., ★★★★ out of four) stands tall, re-illuminating the well-etched contours of Churchill’s monumental life with scrupulous scholarship and a flair for unearthing the telling detail; looking twice where most biographers have been content to glance once.

Here are five time-honored Churchillian bio-tropes, reframed and refreshed by Roberts’ keen attention to historical context.

1. The purported poor judgment of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Churchill was scapegoated by his own government for the 1915 disaster at Gallipoli during World War I. Roberts re-examines this episode, as all Churchill biographers have, and largely exculpates him. Along the way, though, he shares an obscure, arm-wrestling exchange of letters between Churchill and King George V over the naming of new Royal Navy ships, begun in Churchill’s second month as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, that inexorably reveals just how full of himself the 30-something Churchill could be.

Churchill keeps pushing names that his King shoots down. “Instead of… letting the matter drop,” Roberts writes, “Churchill dug in his heels. So did the King… There was something almost comic about the obstinacy. Churchill would in all likelihood have continued the unequal struggle indefinitely,” Roberts concludes, had one high naval subordinate whom he “admired and trusted” not finally persuaded him to just drop it.

2. His time in the trenches led to Churchill's stand against Hitler.

Though painted as a war monger by the Hitler-appeasing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Churchill and a small cohort of anti-appeasers in Parliament insisted that only by standing up to Adolf Hitler could England hope to avoid another world war. Roberts detects “a fascinating dichotomy” in this confrontation.

“Although the appeasement movement was intended to prevent another war,” he notes, “most of its leaders had not seen action in the Great War, whereas most of the anti-appeasers had.” They were led by Churchill, who, after resigning as First Lord because of Gallipoli, actually had gone and fought in the trenches.

3. Goebbels' propaganda campaign against Churchill.

In May 1940, with the Nazi invasion of France, Churchill was named prime minister because, as Churchill himself said, “no one else wanted the job.” The British people, however, took to their new PM immediately. A July 1940 Gallup poll, according to Roberts, gave Churchill an 88 percent approval rating.

Yet, at this very moment, Roberts points out, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was proclaiming “that Churchill was being bribed by the Jews to continue the war but that a fifth column would soon remove him from power. He encouraged Britons to write chain letters for peace, to hiss and boo Churchill’s appearance on the cinema newsreels and to horsewhip him whenever he appeared in public.”

They did not, of course. Still, one cannot help but ponder what Goebbels might have wrought with his fake news had there been an internet at his disposal and social media at his fingertips.

4. The irony of the famed “Finest Hour” speech.

Confronting the impending “Battle of Britain,” Churchill, on June 18, 1940, delivered in Parliament what Roberts rightly calls a “peroration (that) will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken.” "If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years,” Churchill famously closed, “men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”

Yet, remarks Roberts, “the British Empire was not long to outlast Hitler’s Nazi one”; ultimately, “less than a decade more.”

5. A telling moment after the war ended.

Churchill, at war’s end, pivoted almost immediately to a position of forgiveness toward Germany and antagonism toward Stalin and Russia. Roberts captures this with an after-hours encounter in the House of Commons Smoking Room between Churchill and an old wartime Labour Party nemesis, now advocating amity with Germany.

“Of course I’ve forgiven you,” Churchill assures the man, when asked. “Indeed, I agree with very much that you are saying about the Germans… Such hatred that I have left in me – and it isn’t much – I would rather reserve for the future than the past.” Churchill then moved on alone, murmuring, almost to himself: “Hmm. A judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Yes, there are still things to learn about Churchill, as fine new biography reveals