No human being alive today knows Britain’s legendary lion of a Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, than Martin Gilbert.
No account of Churchill’s life is more audaciously complete than Gilbert’s massive project called simply ‘A Life’.
And what a life! Churchill famously failed at most things to which he put his hand until he became his besieged country’s prime minister, just in time to succeed singularly in clawing a future out of nothing but isolation and darkness.
From childhood, through his adventures in the Boer War and on into a political career that was distinguished only by the alleged spectacular failure of the Dardanelles, Gilbert details a doomed life in astonishing detail. Then, the war, and it seemed that all of Churchill’s life had prepared him for this dread moment, which Britain somehow alchemized into an exhausted victory.
Gilbert is an unashamed practioner of ‘great men’ historiography. It would be hard for a Churchill scholar to be otherwise, given its immense subject. Gilbert is the dean and monarch of Churchill scholarship, a point of reference to whom all others who would write on the topic necessarily allude.
Unless you have a large appetite, it might be wise to begin your reading of Winston Churchill elsewhere and with a somewhat slimmer volume. But by all means end up here.
Canter Bridge 
I agree that Martin Gilbert is the man to read about Churchill, both for scholarship and for storytelling, I’d beg to differ with the idea that Churchill “famously failed at most things to which he put his hand.” He was a successful author, a hero of the Boer war, and, even in his “wilderness years,” a force to be reckoned with.
Thanks for the post! You should consider reading the equivilant of the DVD extras — Gilbert’s excellent “In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey” (note: I am biased in that I recieved a signed copy from the author). But still, it was an excellent and revealing book for any one who knows something of Churchill’s life, or wants to, covering Gilbert’s struggle to discern both the details of Churchill’s life and the content of his character.