Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: Patriotic Gore

Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 352 pp., $28.00.

Seriously now, do we need another book on Winston Churchill? I do a quick search, and Amazon's already offering me 6,975 choices--and that's just books (no slipcovers, stickers or bobble heads). Isn't that enough?

Look, I get it. I'm just as susceptible to the lure of the great man's story as anyone else. Just take the early war-correspondent adventures (above all, to escape from that POW camp in the Boer War), the remarkable flameout as a government minister in World War I, the studied quirks and the literary talents and the herculean booze consumption, the bleak years of political marginalization in the 1930s, the authentic heroism in the searing months of 1940, the clattering defeat at the hands of Labour at war's end, and the tragicomic return to power in the years that followed. And what about the portentous prose, the wit, the physical courage and the insane ambition? The silk bathrobes and underwear, and the Turnbull and Asser siren suit, the astounding energy, the rotundity, the cigars? Who, really, can resist?

And especially in the United States, with such a long history of compulsive Winniephilia. Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, the title of Tom Ricks's new book, sounds like another hagiographic potboiler. But Ricks is trying to make a contemporary point with this lively and accessible book, and to do so he has devised an intriguing argument that juxtaposes Churchill and George Orwell, another figure of twentieth-century British history who has been enjoying something of a rebirth lately as sales of 1984 have soared in the era of T, as the president likes to call himself in his copious tweets.

Compared with Churchill's, though, Orwell's life story is a much harder sell, though John Lanchester does a very good job of it in his recent and marvelously eccentric study Orwell's Nose. Orwell suffered from ill health for much of his life, a good bit of it self-inflicted; was something of a sex fiend, with apparent coprophilic tendencies; and died young, not long after he achieved his first measure of literary fame. To be sure, his story had its own share of adventure--from his early years as a colonial policeman in Burma to his innovative reporting on the underclass to his tour of duty, as it were, as an anarchist fighter in the Spanish Civil War. But it's certainly not as stirring a tale as Churchill's, and it takes place on the dark and claustrophobic stage of a struggling intellectual who was deeply out of step with the ubiquitous left-wing cant of his day.

"On the surface," Rick acknowledges, "the two men were quite different." Orwell (born Eric Blair) came from modest origins, and pursued a rather checkered path until he was able to make a go of it as a journalist, writer and political radical. From almost the beginning Churchill, by contrast, envisioned a dazzling public career, seeking every opportunity to further his ambitions and demonstrate his will to power, partly in an effort to redeem the family...