SOURCE: “Mr. Winston Churchill as a Prose-Writer,” in London Mercury, Vol. 15, No. 90, April 1927, pp. 626-34.

In the following essay, Freeman evaluates Churchill's abilities as a prose writer, finding that his writing will endure for its style and dramatic effect alone.

I

Fame is the spur, I suppose, when a man of affairs, a Cabinet Minister, takes upon himself the task of telling the story of the deadliest struggle in which a Great Nation has ever engaged. I do not mean his own fame, or fame in any narrow sense, although Mr. Churchill has been at pains to vindicate his own reputation, but fame in Milton's sense, that quick, generous and powerful impulse by which a man's instincts and passions are turned to an exercise beyond the satisfaction of the moment. It cannot have been merely to prove that he was right here, far-seeing there, at first thwarted and...