The Bulldog Barks On

He topped a BBC poll of all-time "Great Britons" two weeks ago. A few days earlier a German scholar grabbed headlines by accusing him of deliberately bombing civilians during World War II. Book-stores teem with his biographies, including new entries by historians John Ramsden, John Lukacs and John Keegan, plus a novel based on his fleeting acquaintance with the notorious spy Guy Burgess. More than four decades after his death, Winston Churchill's shadow falls heavily over Britain.

That's the starting point for historian David Cannadine's fascinating collection of essays, In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. To Cannadine, the story of modern Britain is "the feeling that things were no longer as great or as stable or as splendid as they had once been." As empire and prosperity slipped away, a few voices rose to stem history's tide. He assesses the efforts of comic-opera geniuses Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as novelist Ian Fleming, whose agent James Bond was a one-man antidote to the Cold War. Also Margaret Thatcher, for whom decline was a moral question but whose "hectoring intolerance proved her undoing."

Churchill's genius was that he knew how to hector. "He turned out words and phrases in tumultuous torrent and inexhaustible abundance — inspiring, exhorting, moving, persuading, cajoling, thundering, bullying, abusing and enraging," writes Cannadine. Churchill's collected speeches run to 4 million words, including the great phrases "blood, toil, tears and sweat" and "their finest hour." His off-the-cuff gems were well-rehearsed, but they rallied Britain in its darkest hour.

He never stopped rallying, so weary voters dumped him when the danger receded. "There went out of British public life," laments Cannadine, "a splendour of utterance which it seems highly unlikely will ever be seen or heard or witnessed again." Britain is a smaller place today, a sound-bite world where people are less interested in eloquence than in property prices and sex scandals. They would do well to hark back to their hero. "The day may dawn," declared Churchill in his 1955 parliamentary farewell, "when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth, serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair." The colonies may be gone, but Churchill showed how the supple power of the English language — whose reach still grows — can forge an empire on which the sun need never set.