BOOK REVIEWS By Ed Needham www.strong-words.co.uk but his temperament was volatile, possibly because no-one could emerge undamaged from so much exposure to Winston’s colossal personality, and father and son would often clash in a “brutal mix of anger and pain.” Randolph generated more of that anger and pain by standing unasked in a pre-war election, wrecking the Tory vote for the seat and his own chance at a political career, and although a journalist of considerable output, came to devote much of his energy toward constructing his own toxic reputation. He “staggered around London, littering his path with gratuitous insults” and “ruined parties, gate-crashed private dinners, immolated friendships that had lasted for decades.” His post-war productivity was largely reduced to writing dad’s giant biography, but ultimately that long shadow served a more destructive purpose: as an ideal environment for Randolph’s abundant flaws to flourish.
NON-FICTION
CHURCHILL AND SON By Josh Ireland (John Murray, £12.99)
I
n 1964, a year before his father’s death and just four ahead of his own at 56, Randolph Churchill was operated on for a benign tumour. Evelyn Waugh remarked that it was typical of modern science to remove the only part of him that wasn’t malignant. Winston Churchill’s wartime personal secretary John Coleville concurred, remembering Randolph as “one of the most objectionable people I had ever met.” By his end, Randolph was chugging through two bottles of scotch and 100 cigarettes daily – not traditionally the sign of a happy man nor the kind of fumes many would envy. Yet this biography of the relationship between Winston and his son goes some way towards restoring a little colour to Randolph’s battered reputation, as well as showing an aspect of Winston that has tended to command little of the torrent of ink devoted to him: that of warm and loving father. Winston’s own father, another Randolph, had kept the emotional temperature as low as possible, yet Winston always treated his own boy as an intimate, even greeting him as an adult with a kiss. Such a firm footing helped Randolph to become “a young man whose self-confidence was so large it appeared it could swallow galaxies whole” and he was an exceptional public speaker,
A WAITER IN PARIS By Edward Chisholm (Monoray, £16.99)
T
wo years after completing the extortionate rituals of a British university education, Edward Chisholm has discovered the true value of a degree – he is still jobless. Attempting a spot of out-of-the-box thinking, he moves to Paris with a girlfriend, thinking that perhaps that’s where all the jobs are hiding. If they are, he doesn’t find them, and then she leaves him anyway. Now what? With his need to eat overcoming the embarrassment of his mediocre French, he scams a job as a ‘runner’ at a large Parisian restaurant of some repute, although his language skills are insufficient for him to understand what the job entails. He learns soon enough, the hard way. A runner is a sort of waiter’s lackey, being constantly hissed at to help clear tables or carry vast trays of glasses on the fingertips of a single hand. Payment at the end of a 14-hour day is in the form of tips from the waiters – except they don’t cough up.
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