BOOK REVIEW: The Last Titans: How Churchill and de Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World
By Richard Vinen / Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole
The Reviewer Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government
REVIEW — Richard Charles Vinen is a British historian and academic of modern Europe at King’s College London. He also writes for the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and the Financial Times.
In The Last Titans, first published in the United Kingdom in 2025, Richard Vinen offers a bracing, comparative life of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that doubles as a very British meditation on leadership, mythmaking, and managing national decline. Instead of a cradle‑to‑grave pair of doorstop biographies, Vinen curates the decisive episodes where these two “artists of history” staged politics as performance—shaping symbols, sentences, and statecraft to save Britain and France, and to recast their countries’ places in a post‑1945 order. The result is compact in scope, fueled by sharp anecdotes, and skeptical of hagiography.
The book is organized into an essayistic Introduction (“Artists of History”), twelve chronologically anchored chapters from “Early Lives, 1874–1930” through “Afterlives,” and a concluding reflection, plus notes and bibliography. The span runs from formative years through the pre‑war 1930s, the fall of France, the fraught wartime alliance, post‑war wilderness, the Fifth Republic, and both men’s after‑images. It is deliberately a “shorter” book that draws out themes rather than a conventional twin‑biography.
From that point of view, The Last Titans is a lucid comparative portrait of two men who treated politics as an art and themselves as its principal exhibits. This is worth repeating: Vinen casts Churchill and de Gaulle as “artists of history,” conscious shapers of national myth who understood that words could be deeds and that gestures could govern. The kinships—soldier‑writers, born in the nineteenth century, are acknowledged only to make the contrasts bite: Churchill a clubbable parliamentarian for whom public life was an endless performance; de Gaulle the austere chef who prized distance and silence. Vinen’s set‑pieces—Churchill dictating from the bath; de Gaulle’s carapace of formality—are not cabinet gossip but evidence for a deeper claim about style as statecraft, and about how each man manufactured legitimacy at moments when his country’s fortunes were perilously poised.
The book’s argument sharpens as it moves through the 1930s and 1940s. Churchill is sketched as the consummate House of Commons animal—often inconsistent in doctrine, but unerring in his feel for the chamber and, ultimately, for the microphone—whose abundant paper trail lets the historian hear his growl in the files. De Gaulle, by contrast, made ambiguity a method: he spoke sparingly, let subordinates act on inferred wishes, and even disowned phrases later attached to his legend. Vinen is good on the pieties and hypocrisies of empire (Churchill’s India preoccupations), on the over‑sold influence of Vers l’Armée de Métier upon blitzkrieg, and on the way both men used myth without mistaking it for fact. In that regard, Vinen echoes the famous British historian and strategist, Liddell Hart’s thoughts: ‘The right idea but wordy and woolly. No clear and precise strategical and/or tactical suggestions.’
The Fall of France becomes the hinge: for Churchill, a military shock that vindicated his rhetoric of defiance; for de Gaulle, the shipwreck of a state that required a new act of founding, not merely a counter‑attack.
Vinen reads them as managers of decline under the lengthening American shadow—Churchill romantic, sometimes to a fault; de Gaulle colder‑eyed, which is why strategists like Kennan and Kissinger found him bracing.
Vinen promises a “shorter book” and keeps his word, trimming biography to theme without losing authority. The prose is coolly sardonic, the anecdotes well‑chosen the myth‑busting firm but never joyless. If one occasionally longs for a broader reckoning with imperial consequence or a little more granularity on Churchill after 1951, the gains in clarity and pace are worth the economies. What remains is an elegant study in how persona becomes policy, and how two last titans wrote themselves—and their countries—through defeat into endurance.
Vinen’s harder point is that the real test was not victory but the management of decline under a stronger ally. Churchill, the romantic, sometimes willed away awkward realities of British weakness; de Gaulle, more Bismarckian, grasped the American century early and plotted for French room to maneuver—small wonder that Kennan and Kissinger admired him.
Quite similarly for Canada today—Euro-Atlanticist by habit, North American by geography—this is the live, historical, and ongoing question: how to preserve agency inside an asymmetrical alliance without petulance or self‑harm?
Further, Vinen sets his stage with a telling contrast in democratic wear: Churchill lived inside elections and the House of Commons; de Gaulle avoided parties and parliaments and, once he built the Fifth Republic, submitted himself to universal suffrage but once—preferring the dignity of the presidency to the scrum of the chamber. These were not quirks of temperament; they were chosen as operating systems for authority. Churchill left a thunder of paper—memos, minutes, telegrams—that lets historians hear the great Briton’s personality tackling the issues of governing His Majesty’s empire; de Gaulle wrote as well, maybe more sparingly, communicated by signal, and often let ministers act on inferred wishes, the better to keep options open. Both curated their legends; Churchill, sometimes enslaved by his own romance; de Gaulle, its master.
When the storm broke in 1940, each man’s technique mapped onto national need. For Churchill, the fall of France was a military shock that demanded a nation in voice; for de Gaulle it was a shipwreck of state that demanded refoundation.
Vinen is alert to Churchill’s Indian preoccupations and the broader imperial cast of mind, yet those hoping for a fuller reckoning with empire’s downstream consequences—beyond their imprint on high politics—may feel short‑changed. His decision to place biography back at center stage largely pays off, though a handful of passages would bear another turn of the social‑economic screw, not least on how shifting class alignments and the new media ecologies of the mid‑century helped to manufacture the very myths the book so deftly parses.
And while the Churchill material has irresistible lift in the 1930s and wartime chapters, the later premiership (1951–55) receives briefer treatment than some readers might wish—fair enough, perhaps, given that this is not offered as a full‑dress life.
None of this detracts from the pleasure of the prose. Vinen writes with economy and sly humor, setting a scene, weighing a claim, and moving on with a don’s clarity and a reporter’s eye. The tone remains cool towards legend without lapsing into joylessness. For readers who prefer their history skeptical rather than cynical, it is an invigorating companion.
In sum, a smart, elegant comparative that trims biographical fat to reveal how two “last titans” composed themselves—literally and politically—at moments when language, legend, and limited means had to carry nations through existential storms. It is a superb leadership study and a quietly subversive contribution to how we remember 20th‑century power, incarnated in its quintessential men of destiny and artists of history.
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