From the Preface to this volume by editor Larry P. Arnn: “This 23rd volume of documents in the official biography of Winston Churchill is the last step in a journey that began 57 years ago, having been prepared for decades earlier. One will find in this volume a letter that Churchill wrote to his son Randolph in 1960: ‘I think that your biography of Derby is a remarkable work, and I should be happy that you should write my official biography when the time comes. But I must ask you to defer this until after my death. I would not like to release my papers piece-meal, and I think that you should wait for my own Archives and from the Trust. In any case I do not want anything to be published until at least five years after my death.’ Here Churchill finalizes a suggestion he had made years earlier: his son Randolph was to be his official biographer. The work would begin two years later, in 1962, when Randolph hired young historian Martin Gilbert as research assistant. They would inherit a treasure trove of information and then proceed to add to its volume and value continuously. This biography is then a kind of middle way between learning from the original documents alone and reading a narrative. In the official biography of Winston Churchill, we have a long and careful narrative written by two people who believed not only in following the evidence, but also in walking side by side with it. And then we have the documents from which they wrote, and more documents still, reproduced and available, most of them in full. They are indexed, annotated, and published. The reader may then use the biography either as the great story it is, or as a tool to do historical research. The narrative volumes are a guide to the document volumes, the document volumes evidence for the narrative.”
