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Virtues and vices of the Tories’ biggest beast ever
Gary Cox reviews The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson (Hodder & Stoughton, £25)

Winston Churchill died at the age of 90 on January 24 1965 and, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the Tories’ biggest big beast, Mayor of London Boris Johnson has written this entertaining and balanced biography of his hero.

He takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach in jumping around the vast Churchill territory but the ones Johnson has chosen are apt and imaginative and the whole is neatly held together by his chatty prose.

All the usual Churchill factors are there — a glamorous mother, a disappointed father who died young, public school capers and catastrophes, workaholism, prolific journalism and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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