The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of glory, 1874-1932

In "The Last Lion," the first volume of Manchester's two-volume biography, the Winston Spencer Churchill story is one of high adventure, bitter defeats, and the inner strength of the towering Englishman whose watchword was: "Never give in. Never, never, never, never give in." In historical crises his soaring prose and histrionic manner made superb theatre. Lesser politicians, like Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin ("Two nurses, " he called them, "fit to keep silence in a darkened room"), could not grasp his vision, his complex drives, and his desperate search for ways to escape the heavy, almost suicidal depressions which stalked him throughout his extraordinary career.