“Reputation,” Shakespeare makes one of his characters remark, “is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving”—an observation that should be pondered by anyone or any group in our own time who wants to pull statues down or, indeed, to put them up. All his life, Winston Churchill was fascinated by the matter of fluctuating reputations, both other people’s and also his own. When writing the biography of his father, Lord Randolph, young Winston noted that the “party standards” by which politicians were judged during their lifetime bore no necessary relation to what might be their “ultimate reputation,” whenever that would happen, and whatever it would be. And he made the same point in his eulogy of Neville Chamberlain late in 1940: “In one phase men seem to have been right; in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in
UNLIMITED
