The Grand Design
I was glad to see that Lord Attlee went out of his way in his House of Lords eulogy to refer to Churchill's great biography of Marlborough. As we all know, the volumes of The Second World War present an unequalled narrative of the greatest of all the wars; and Balfour once called' The World Crisis a 'brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe.' Yet I still think that Marl- borough: His Life and Times was Churchill's greatest literary achievement. He began the study at the beginning of the locust years, and the final, fourth volume appeared just before Munich. He ransacked the muniment room at Blenheim to draw his vast tapestry of John Churchill's grand design against the tyranny of Louis XIV, a tapestry with such dazzling sub-plots as the pas- sionate friendship of Sarah and Anne, the back- stairs intrigue of Harley and Bolingbroke which ended the war, and the final triumph of the Whigs in 1714. It was one of John Kennedy's favourite books; did Churchill himself, I wonder, take solace in July 1945 from that New Year's Day in 1712 when the Gazetteannounced 'the dismissal of Marlborough from all his offices . - .'?
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