Gilbert, who is author of the definitive eight-volume Churchill biography, persuasively discredits these claims. He is less successful in debunking longstanding allegations by critics such as Israeli historian Michael J. Cohen that Churchill, while expressing horror and concern, did little or nothing to prevent the Holocaust. After Jewish leaders pleaded with the Allies in 1944 to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, Churchill instructed his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, "Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary." Nothing happened. The Royal Air Force, it seems, had other priorities, and Churchill never followed up.

Gilbert's book is an ardent hagiography of a great man, and the portrait at times seems less than three-dimensional. Even less enthralling is Gilbert's reliance on long quotations from Churchill's speeches and writings. We get page after page of Churchill's remarks to the House of Commons on this issue and that, interspersed with one-line sentences from Gilbert. This is history as stenography, and the book inevitably feels like a set of out-takes from Gilbert's masterly biography. Its subject may be intriguing, but little here seems new or surprising.