The Men Around Churchill

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THE author of a popular biography of Winston Churchill proves equally successful, as a general rule, in conveying the essential personalities of a round dozen of Churchill’s associates. The author selects four wearers of the conversationally rather frayed ‘old school tie’ — Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden, Sir Archibald Sinclair, and Sir KingsleyWood— and five men of Labor—Bevin, Morrison, Atlee, Alexander, and Greenwood. He adds two soldiers, Sir Archibald Wavell and the less known Sir John Dill, who is now at the summit of the British military hierarchy. Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps figure as ‘eccentrics’ — the restless little Canadian who watches pennies and throws around thousands of pounds, who, after a life devoted to upholding capitalism, told the executives of the factories under his control as Minister of Aircraft Production that their responsibility was to the state, not to the stockholders; and the radical lawyer who made a bad first impression in Moscow because he failed to observe the niceties of diplomatic protocol. The book ends where British after-dinner toasts begin, with the King, of whom the author gives a very sympathetic and lifelike portrait. Some of the sketches, like the personalities, are fuller and more vivid than others. But Mr. Kraus commands and holds the reader’s attention by a judicious combination of information, anecdote, and paradox. W. H. C.