Reviews for Churchill, the Great Game and Total War

The average rating for Churchill, the Great Game and Total War based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-19 00:00:00 Gary Kallio I never really got Macmillan; 500 pages later I still don't. But this isn't Williams' fault; he skillfully combines a humane and generous account with judgements that are measured but give absolutely no quarter. Wilson said Macmillan "posed as a poseur" and this gets near the essence of the man; his layers of deception - what Williams calls "the mask". Harold married a Cavendish: big mistake. While it allowed him to become (except by birth) the perfect languid Edwardian aritocrat, it disastrously exposed him to the humiliation of Dorothy's Boothby fixation. He survived by assuming, and then, says Williams, becoming, "the mask". Politically his achievements were almost negligible. He rode the wave of the later fifties boom without really understanding it, nor why it began to fade. He kept us out of Europe but in the nuclear club. He got the Tories out of Suez (his solitary achievement?) then announced the winding down of empire. He sucked up to the Americans (JFK's "uncle Harold"), but he was no Greek to their Roman. Williams says he was "neither one thing nor the other". This is right; almost great, almost tragic, Harold never quite succeeded in being either.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-31 00:00:00 Scott Harris A cursory look at Irish history from the tribes of the early first millenium up through the Troubles to the year 2000. Having known very little about Irish history, this was a good overview but I have to stress that it is very, very broad. With such a large span of time to cover in just over 300 pages, you're bound to miss out on a lot of important details. The fact that the portion of the book dedicated to the Irish Civil War pot-independence was only given about 8 pages, however, seemed a bit lacking. If you've read Wikipedia articles on Irish history, then find a book that delves deeper into specific aspects of Irish history in which you're interested.