Almost exactly 100 years ago, the legendary Lytton Strachey startled his stuffy contemporaries by publishing Eminent Victorians, a masterpiece of subtle wit that punctured a hole in the myths and shibboleths attached to such luminaries as Dr. Arnold and Florence Nightingale. It was an instant succes de scandale and has never gone out of print since.

A century later, openly poaching the same technique, the young historian, Andrew Roberts, published Eminent Churchillians, poking an equally revisionist hole in several pretenders to the prime ministerial throne, all of whom had hitched their coattails to Churchill's wagon, for largely selfish reasons, and gone along for the ride (including the late unlamented Lord Mountbatten, the case for whose impeachment your correspondent most heartily agrees with).

25 years after that, Mr. Roberts has now gone one better, by tackling the man himself. In so doing, he has written a veritable masterwork that not only crowns his own career, but neatly supplants its legion of predecessors in one fell stroke. Of these, the late Roy Jenkins, whose own study, "Churchill: a Biography", met with similar accolades in 2001, becoming a classic itself at the time, did not have access to the rich trove of additional data released over the intervening 17 years, to which the author had privileged access.

It is this material that differentiates Andrew Roberts' biography from the pack. Diaries, letters, transcripts and even some unpublished memoirs of Churchill's contemporaries, all only lately released, have greatly enriched a tale of such stature that it bodes well to becoming definitive.

Churchill's lasting monument is, of course, his consummate handling of World War II, without which the entire world would have taken a nasty turn. Here, too, Andrew Roberts rises to the occasion; and in "What Might Have Been", his anthology of "alternate histories", written by the likes of Amanda Foreman and Antonia Fraser, published in 2004, one such essay covered a German-Japanese victory, most recently (and brilliantly) addressed in a TV series called The Man in the Castle (q.v. below, and warmly recommended).

Lengthy, but brilliantly written and remarkably smooth to read, behold a classic in the making.

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