Smuts and Churchill, two flickering lamps in the gloom
'How is it, you may ask, that the name of this long-forgotten South African legend could have been so deeply intertwined with that of Churchill?'
BOOK REVIEW Churchill & Smuts - The Friendship by Richard Steyn (Jonathan Ball Publishers, June 2017) To the reading public – an ever diminishing subset of homo sapiens – the appearance of the name ‘Churchill’ in yet another new title may well elicit a passing yawn. In his Acknowledgements, author Richard Steyn notes that Winston Churchill has been the subject of more than 1 500 biographies, and “the number continues to rise”. He is clear that he has no intention in his new book of rehashing what has already been accomplished by acclaimed historians such as Martin Gilbert, William Manchester’s trilogy (finished by Paul Reid in 2012, 24 years after Manchester’s second volume on Churchill was published in 1988), along with Roy Jenkins’s biography, master-historian Max Hastings’s numerous books on World War 11 , and so many more. Boris Johnston’s more recent biography on Churchill never once mentions the name of Jan Smuts. How is it, you may ask, that the name of this long-forgotten So...
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