[In the following review, Morison offers high praise for Churchill's “style, judgment, and fairness” in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Age of Revolution.]

Sir Winston has done it again in [A History of the English Speaking Peoples: The Age of Revolution]! In less than 400 pages (excluding the maps) he has covered English, English Colonial, and United States history from 1688 to 1815. He is a challenge to all historians; for he has written no mere précis of facts, but a living and glowing narrative, a story, as history essentially is, or should be. And it is not superficial; on almost every page your reviewer can see that either Sir Winston or his researchers are familiar with the best works on the subject he describes. Yet he always follows the maxim ars est celare artem, and never makes a parade of his scholarship; unless, as in an occasional footnote (e.g., p. 191), he sends a mischievous signal to American historians—“Ha! Ha! Something you didn't know!” His characterizations are always felicitous; George Grenville was a “mulish lawyer”; Newcastle was—“shuffled querulously out of office,” and so on right through. And it is full of humor—note especially what he writes on Napoleon's letter to the Prince Regent.

In the short compass of one volume a sense of values is highly important; and here Sir Winston is his own judge. There are pages on battles—almost a whole chapter on Trafalgar, and what a chapter! Even without a chart we can follow the movements of the fleets better than in a recent biography of Nelson. But it is not only on battles that the author lingers lovingly. Surprisingly, he devotes five pages to John Wilkes, not because Jack was a picturesque character, but because his struggle with the government is a landmark in the history of liberty. Camden's classic statement of the rule of law is quoted, and a long paragraph on general warrants ends with this pregnant sentence (p. 168), “not until the world wars of the twentieth century was the mere word of a Minister of the Crown enough to legalise the imprisonment of an Englishman.”

Although a Tory by training and temperament, Sir Winston sees through the efforts of neo-Tory historians to whitewash George III and blacken the Whigs. The King's “responsibility for the final breach is a high one. He could not understand those who feared the consequences of a policy of coercion.” (p. 172). The chapter on “The Quarrel with America” is perfectly fair; his account of the War of Independence, lively, accurate and fascinating. The paragraph on John Paul Jones, which naturally catches the eye of this naval historian, is full of errors; Sir Winston seems to have followed one of those wretched novels about Jones which masquerade as biographies. Jones was not a “privateer” but a captain U. S. N.; he was not aided by “three smaller vessels” in the fight with H.M.S. Serapis, but handicapped by one; the battle ended at 10:30 P.m., not “toward dawn,” and the powder magazine of Serapis did not “blow up,” nor were her guns “wrecked,” killing “all abaft the mainmast.” Captain Pearson, who was standing on the quarterdeck, surrendered when three of his guns were still firing, because his mainmast was tottering and about to crash.

The chapters on the Federal Constitution, the early federal administrations, and the War of 1812 are as thorough as the space allows, and surprisingly accurate. The Hamilton vs. Jefferson quarrel, and its significance, has never been better done in as short a space.

Although Sir Winston is a descendant, on his mother's side, of American “rebels,” and belongs to the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati in his own right, he is above all sectional prejudice respecting different parts of the old empire. Bostonians may object to his dictum that their city was “of no strategic importance” (p. 186), but they cannot complain of his description of John Adams, whom he calls “one of the ablest political thinkers among American statesmen.” And he closes one chapter with an eloquent tribute to Jefferson.

The object of Sir Winston in this volume has been to lead English, American and Canadian readers to learn more about one another's countries. This reviewer believes that no man alive could have done it any better, or nearly so well. If only more historians would write with his style, judgment, and fairness, the English-speaking public might return to the love of historical writing that it had in the days of Macaulay and Prescott.