We already have plenty of biographies of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, as well as a "magisterial" joint study by François Kersaudy, published in 1981.
But in this "relatively short introduction to the pair", the historian Richard Vinen offers us something new, said Piers Brendon in Literary Review – "a kind of meditation, drawing out key themes in the lives of the two men who in 1940 embodied the spirit of resistance to Nazism".
Both saw themselves as men of destiny – de Gaulle even more so than Churchill – and both were "iron-willed but not inflexible". Among the book's great strengths, however, is Vinen's sharp observation of the contrasts between them. Churchill, the "aristocratic epicurean", was "squat, extravagant, quixotic and ebullient" – a "cavalier" who saw war as "a glorious adventure". De Gaulle could seem like his "living antithesis", a "bourgeois stoic" – "tall, austere, melancholic and aloof", a "samurai" for whom war was "a stern duty".
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One of the "many pleasures" of Vinen's "highly readable" book is his "keen eye for detail", said Margaret MacMillan in The Observer, from de Gaulle "horrifying his aides by giving up cigarettes for chewing gum", to Churchill "turning somersaults in his bathtub". And Vinen also insightfully describes their relationship. No one "enraged" Churchill quite as de Gaulle did. As an exile in London during the War, the French brigadier general was in a "very weak" position. Yet he was relentlessly condescending towards his hosts, and – while fighting, as he saw it, for his country's dignity – he made some "dreadful scenes" (as when the British told him only at the last minute about the D-Day landings). "He thinks he's Joan of Arc, but I can't get my bloody bishops to burn him," Churchill exclaimed. Even so, each had a grudging admiration for the other, with de Gaulle once noting privately that Churchill was "the genius of this war", though "a little too prone to take refuge in whisky".
Vinen also has much to say about the postwar era, said Philip Stephens in the Financial Times. Churchill, though a great optimist, was like "an old man mourning for the past" in the 1950s, struggling to find a political purpose while his "treasured empire" unravelled. The pessimistic de Gaulle, by contrast, not only reunited France after liberation in 1944, but later established the Fifth Republic and may well have saved it from civil war over Algeria. The book feels "well-timed": it throws an interesting light on how France and Britain, now "diminished powers", can work together today.
