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Churchill: The End of Glory : A Political Biography
A revisionist historian takes on the legend of Churchill, arguing that while the prime minister did indeed save England, his mistakes cost his country, and the world, dearly. By the author of Duff Cooper. National ad/promo. Tour.
742 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
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135 people want to read
About the author
John Charmley
21 books6 followersJohn Denis Charmley was a British academic and diplomatic historian. From 2002 he held various posts at the University of East Anglia: initially as Head of the School of History, then as the Head of the School of Music and most recently as the Head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Humanities. From 2016 he was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Academic strategy at St Mary's University, Twickenham. In this role he was responsible for initiating the University's Foundation Year Programme, reflecting Professor Charmley's commitment to widening educational access.
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October 22, 2025Ron Unz had a good review of this book on his site today, here’s the enticing opening:
“For more than thirty years, I’d occasionally come across harsh attacks against a British historian named John Charmley for writing a highly-critical biography of Winston Churchill, the famed British leader, and that was about the only thing I knew of that author. I’d always vaguely wondered exactly what he’d said about Churchill that had infuriated so many others, and whether his criticism had been warranted, but never had enough of an interest in the topic to investigate it.
Then a year or two ago, I finally got around to ordering Churchill: The End of Glory from Amazon, with a mint copy of his original hardcover edition offered at an extremely attractive price, less than half that of the subsequent paperback version. Unfortunately, the doorstop-sized 750 page tome hardly struck me as casual reading, so it just ended up in a pile of my other books, where it quietly sat for the next eighteen months.
But with those book-piles growing disturbingly high, I finally decided to whittle them down a bit, and a book as thick as Charmley’s seemed like a good contribution to that effort. So I finally got around to reading it a few days ago, along with more than a dozen of the reviews and other articles it had generated, all of which helped refresh my memory of the half-forgotten controversy provoked by its 1993 release.
As Charmley explained on the first page of his text, he devoted 15 years to the book and since he was only 37 when it was released, he must have embarked upon that massive research project near the very beginning of his scholarly career, although he also published four other academic books on related subjects along the way.
The bulk of the massive text was a very detailed and solid presentation of Churchill’s political career prior to his 1940 elevation to Number 10 Downing Street, and I found its material quite informative in that regard though sometimes a bit dull.
I’d certainly known that in 1915 Churchill had been driven from the British Cabinet for the terrible Gallipoli disaster that he’d engineered, but I’d had the mistaken impression that his political career had been blighted during the many years that followed. Instead, I discovered that he’d soon returned to office in 1917, and then spent nearly all of the next dozen years in government, holding a variety of highly important positions, many of them near the very top of the political ladder, though his record in these posts was often regarded as less than successful.
Ironically enough, it was instead Prime Minister David Lloyd George—Britain’s victorious leader of the First World War—who was forced out in 1922 and never once regained a government position during the remaining two decades of his life.
The reason for Lloyd George’s political eclipse was the complete collapse of his British Liberal Party, reduced to a mere shadow of its previous standing. Its place on the political spectrum was largely usurped by Britain’s newly risen socialists of the Labour Party, which held power alone or in coalition during most of the 1920s.
The key factor behind the replacement of the Liberals had been the massive expansion of the British franchise in early 1918, removing property qualifications for voting and therefore tripling the size of the electorate, allowing the large working-class to finally play a central role in elections. Much of that working-class voted Labour, and the Liberals disappeared as a result.
Another important factor was the severe political backlash against the horrific human losses that Britain had suffered during the war, with most of the electorate now considering Britain’s involvement to have been a disatrous mistake that they blamed upon the Liberals who had governed during those years. It’s certainly more than coincidental that some of the most important early Labour leaders such as E.D. Morel had been ardent anti-war activists, even suffering years of harsh wartime imprisonment for their views. As a Cabinet member, Churchill had been notorious for his bellicosity, and in the 1922 elections he lost his parliamentary seat to Morel, with Churchill forced to spend the next couple of years out of politics.
The Charmley biography was tremendously rich in detail, and if I’d read it a decade ago, I surely would have missed many of its most telling and almost hidden elements, items that seemed to similarly escape the notice of all the many distinguished reviewers.
For example, on p. 383 the author devoted two half-sentences to a somewhat cryptic reference to what was almost certainly the central turning point of World War II. But since that story has suffered near-total suppression for 85 years by virtually all Western historians, I doubt if even one reader in a hundred picked up on that item:
At the Supreme War Council on 28 March…Chamberlain had put forward a number of plans for offensive operations. These included a scheme of Churchill’s…and a plan for attacking the Baku oilfields in Russia from which Germany obtained much of her oil…attacking the Baku fields, although a more attractive prospect, involved the risk of war with Russia.”
“For more than thirty years, I’d occasionally come across harsh attacks against a British historian named John Charmley for writing a highly-critical biography of Winston Churchill, the famed British leader, and that was about the only thing I knew of that author. I’d always vaguely wondered exactly what he’d said about Churchill that had infuriated so many others, and whether his criticism had been warranted, but never had enough of an interest in the topic to investigate it.
Then a year or two ago, I finally got around to ordering Churchill: The End of Glory from Amazon, with a mint copy of his original hardcover edition offered at an extremely attractive price, less than half that of the subsequent paperback version. Unfortunately, the doorstop-sized 750 page tome hardly struck me as casual reading, so it just ended up in a pile of my other books, where it quietly sat for the next eighteen months.
But with those book-piles growing disturbingly high, I finally decided to whittle them down a bit, and a book as thick as Charmley’s seemed like a good contribution to that effort. So I finally got around to reading it a few days ago, along with more than a dozen of the reviews and other articles it had generated, all of which helped refresh my memory of the half-forgotten controversy provoked by its 1993 release.
As Charmley explained on the first page of his text, he devoted 15 years to the book and since he was only 37 when it was released, he must have embarked upon that massive research project near the very beginning of his scholarly career, although he also published four other academic books on related subjects along the way.
The bulk of the massive text was a very detailed and solid presentation of Churchill’s political career prior to his 1940 elevation to Number 10 Downing Street, and I found its material quite informative in that regard though sometimes a bit dull.
I’d certainly known that in 1915 Churchill had been driven from the British Cabinet for the terrible Gallipoli disaster that he’d engineered, but I’d had the mistaken impression that his political career had been blighted during the many years that followed. Instead, I discovered that he’d soon returned to office in 1917, and then spent nearly all of the next dozen years in government, holding a variety of highly important positions, many of them near the very top of the political ladder, though his record in these posts was often regarded as less than successful.
Ironically enough, it was instead Prime Minister David Lloyd George—Britain’s victorious leader of the First World War—who was forced out in 1922 and never once regained a government position during the remaining two decades of his life.
The reason for Lloyd George’s political eclipse was the complete collapse of his British Liberal Party, reduced to a mere shadow of its previous standing. Its place on the political spectrum was largely usurped by Britain’s newly risen socialists of the Labour Party, which held power alone or in coalition during most of the 1920s.
The key factor behind the replacement of the Liberals had been the massive expansion of the British franchise in early 1918, removing property qualifications for voting and therefore tripling the size of the electorate, allowing the large working-class to finally play a central role in elections. Much of that working-class voted Labour, and the Liberals disappeared as a result.
Another important factor was the severe political backlash against the horrific human losses that Britain had suffered during the war, with most of the electorate now considering Britain’s involvement to have been a disatrous mistake that they blamed upon the Liberals who had governed during those years. It’s certainly more than coincidental that some of the most important early Labour leaders such as E.D. Morel had been ardent anti-war activists, even suffering years of harsh wartime imprisonment for their views. As a Cabinet member, Churchill had been notorious for his bellicosity, and in the 1922 elections he lost his parliamentary seat to Morel, with Churchill forced to spend the next couple of years out of politics.
The Charmley biography was tremendously rich in detail, and if I’d read it a decade ago, I surely would have missed many of its most telling and almost hidden elements, items that seemed to similarly escape the notice of all the many distinguished reviewers.
For example, on p. 383 the author devoted two half-sentences to a somewhat cryptic reference to what was almost certainly the central turning point of World War II. But since that story has suffered near-total suppression for 85 years by virtually all Western historians, I doubt if even one reader in a hundred picked up on that item:
At the Supreme War Council on 28 March…Chamberlain had put forward a number of plans for offensive operations. These included a scheme of Churchill’s…and a plan for attacking the Baku oilfields in Russia from which Germany obtained much of her oil…attacking the Baku fields, although a more attractive prospect, involved the risk of war with Russia.”
February 26, 2016
There's historical revisionism which serves as a useful corrective to the received view, and there's historical revisionism which just tries to sell books. This, I felt, was the latter. There are plenty of other good political biographies of Churchill's life out there which accept his poor judgement prior to 1940 which don't feel the need to write him off at every turn.
May 22, 2023
It is odd to re-read this again, many years from when it came out To tell today's far more cynical readers the shock when Charmley DARED to criticise Churchill Even my father, an old school Labour man, called him John Charmless In another twenty years all those people like my grandparents who felt such a debt to him will be dear. Eventually I am sure a future British prime minister will do a Tony Blair and apologise for Churchills very existence
August 5, 2017
BORING!
November 4, 2013
Very, very dry. Dull.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews