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Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
Virtues and vices of the Tories’ biggest beast ever
Gary Cox reviews The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson (Hodder & Stoughton, £25)
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
JAMES WALSH is moved by a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture, and a plea to work with, not against, the materials and minerals of our world
An immersive, participatory display by a queer Australian Aboriginal performer, and a rebellious unravelling of traditional Scottish dance
Winston Churchill died at the age of 90 on January 24 1965 and, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the Tories’ biggest big beast, Mayor of London Boris Johnson has written this entertaining and balanced biography of his hero.
He takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach in jumping around the vast Churchill territory but the ones Johnson has chosen are apt and imaginative and the whole is neatly held together by his chatty prose.
All the usual Churchill factors are there — a glamorous mother, a disappointed father who died young, public school capers and catastrophes, workaholism, prolific journalism and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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