SOURCE: “Churchill: Actor as Historian,” in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 7, July 1951, pp. 399-411.

In the following essay, Hamilton examines Churchill's public persona versus his role as a historian.

At rare intervals the historian is propelled by wanton Fortune into high public office, as with Guizot and Wilson, and if he survives the experience, he may, as in the case of Guizot, write some account of the contemporary scene worthy of the name of history. The really eminent man of action turned historian is even more rarely found. Memoirs, yes—tons of them. But that public man at the summit whose mind and pen are disciplined to writing that transcends the status of informed reminiscence and can be called history has few fellows. Thucydides, who achieved not the prominence of Churchill, is nonetheless the prototype, and one has to move all the way down to Caesar to find...