Protean figures always elude biography.

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik seems to be able to write about anything (his 1993 appreciation of James Thurber is a wonder). He has a new article out reviewing a new pie of books about Winston Churchill, including the Anglo-Catholic fetishism of Winnie (and C.S. Lewis) as Great Me of History who'd cheerfully turn out several million of the unemployed, just before Christmas, in wartime:

That fatal summer and those fateful words continue to resonate. Revisionism, the itch of historians to say something new about something already known, has nicked Churchill without really drawing blood. In American conservative circles, he is still El Cid with a cigar, hoisted up on his horse to confront the latest existential threat to Western civilization (though his admirers tend to censor out the champagne or cognac glass that this ferocious Francophile kept clamped there, too).