Churchill’s Book Has its Press Critics

Grey River Argus, 8 October 1948, Page 7

Churchill’s Book Has its Press Critics

(N.Z.P.A.—Special Correspondent: LONDON, October 5

With the exception of the Labour Party’s official organ, the “Daily Herald” and the Communist “Daily Worker, which both accuse Britain’s war-time leader of covering up his mistakes and extolling his own prescience, British newspapers enthusiastically praise the first volume of Mr Churchill’s memoirs, “The Gathering Storm.” The "Daily Herald says: "This consistent boastfulness; this almost childish pretention never to have been wrong, is a fatal flaw. Yet, in spite of it, the book maintains a fascinating record of the years before the war and of the first year of the war.”

The “Daily Worker’s” comment is: “Fie is concerned to lay stress upon his own prescience and masterly inside information regarding world affairs. He deluges the reader with his own memoranda and quotations from his speeches, and carefully avoids dealing with his own reactionary political blunders.” The Sunday newspapers yesterday and the morning dailies to-day ail review it at length with extensive quotations. Several have picked on Mr Churchill’s remark to President Roosevelt, when he described the recent conflict as, “the unnecessary war,” for their headlines. "CHILDISH PREJUDICES”

A. J. Cummings, in the "News Chronicle,” says: “With all his blind spots and childish prejudices; with all his nineteenth century ideas, this great ardent patriot, who loves his country with flaming faith and inflexible will, stands pre-eminent among his contemporaries. All the free nations of the earth strive to do him honour. He may not sit again in the seat/of the mighty, but his place in history is assured.” The "Manchester Guardian” says: “ ‘The Gathering Storm’ is assured of the standing of a classic in its own right. Mr Churchill’s style, though its cadences nad ironies are still those of Gibbon, has tightened and sharpened since his volumes on the First World War. Within its limits, his treatment of the pre-war years is masterly.” Scrutator, in the “Sunday Times,” says: “Perhaps one must go back as far as Julius Caesar to find a man of action ranking so high as a man of letters ... If his completed work keeps to the level of this opening instalment, it will indeed be a notable addition to English literature.” Mr Harold Nicolson in the “Daily Telegraph” says: “The memoirs of Mr Churchill stand by themselves. As history they are accurate and objective: as an autobiography, they rank with the great, many self-portraits which the English genius for intimacy has produced; as literature they are models of composition, variety and style.” A FRENCH VIEW

A former French Prime Minister M. Faul Reynaud, in the "Observer” says: “In reading this account, one is reminded of the Roman Senate. It is thus that England grew great through the centuries.” The “Glasgow Herald says: “What impresses any reader must be not the books meticulous accuracy—there are slips in fact and judgments that can w’ell be queried—but its essential and brave truthfulness. It is first and foremost, sincere, in the old sense of that noble word.”

“Taking all his war volumes together, we can be sure that nothing at once so comprehensive and of such first hand authenticity has ever been achieved before by a fighting historian or a history-making warrior,” says the “Yorkshire Post.”

Although the substance of the book appeared in the “Daily Telegraph” some months ago in serial form and

it has been distributed in the United States for the last four months, it was published here only to-day. Already advance orders are a publisher’s record, which seems to indicate that the glimpse the public has already had of the contents of the volume have whetted rather than dulled its interest.