In "The Last Lion," the first volume of Manchester's two-volume
biography, the Winston Spencer Churchill story is one of high adventure,
bitter defeats, and the inner strength of the towering Englishman whose
watchword was: "Never give in. Never, never, never, never give in." In
historical crises his soaring prose and histrionic manner made superb
theatre. Lesser politicians, like Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin
("Two nurses, " he called them, "fit to keep silence in a darkened
room"), could not grasp his vision, his complex drives, and his
desperate search for ways to escape the heavy, almost suicidal
depressions which stalked him throughout his extraordinary career.