Mr. Churchill's war memoirs—they are in fact much more than
that, for they start With Hitler's Chancellorship in 1933—which the Daily Telegraph is to publish serially in this country and Life and the New York Times in America, promise to make their author the most highly remunerated writer in the world. One way and another Mr. Lloyd George netted a good deal over Etoo,000 for his War Memoirs, and there were his Peace Conference Memoirs on top of that. But Mr. Churchill is likely to do a great deal better still. The sum of £25o,00o has been mentioned, and it does not sound ex- cessive in the circumstances. This, however, is a very materialistic aspect of the affair. Mr. Churchill is a brilliant writer, as Mr. Lloyd George was not ; that alone will give his memoirs a place in literature, quite apart from the unpublished history and the wealth of personal anecdotes one can count on finding there. The book indeed should stand on the same exalted plane as Marlborough. To have produced two such works would assure their author immortality even if he had never touched politics at all—though in the latter case the memoirs could, of course, never have been written. Disraeli, I suppose, has hitherto stood first among British politician-authors, for neither Bacon nor Macaulay was a politician of the first rank, in spite of the former's Lord Chancellorship. Now it is Mr. Churchill.
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