Talk:The Second World War (book series)

POV

I missed that the tag was removed before. My complaints with this article have not been resolved; only references have been added. That wasn't my complaint.—Chowbok ☠ 23:59, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually improving the article is a lot better than tagging it and then returning four months later to complain about your complaints not being addressed by someone else. Nick-D (talk) 00:05, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I thought we were supposed to collaborate on resolving controversial issues rather than unilaterally forcing changes through. Okay, from now on I'll edit-war my desired changes through. Thanks for clearing that up.—Chowbok ☠ 00:15, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that I follow you - you can just edit the article per normal conventions. If you'd like to discuss options to improve it, please do so. You tagged the article and posted a fairly unspecific complaint about it here last September, and then didn't participate in the resulting discussion of your post. Turning up four months later and re-adding the tag after it had been removed by another editor who had worked to improve the article and explained his or her reasoning and posting more unspecific complaints isn't an optimal approach. What are your suggestions for how the article could be improved? Nick-D (talk) 00:31, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Chowbok you will have to provide specific examples of how this article "poormouths" the work in order for us to take your tag seriously. If you don't elaborate we are automatically going to have to assume it is a frivolous complaint, since none of us can read minds. --Saddhiyama (talk) 00:46, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

More specifically, we have proper citations (and quotes - we haven't only added refs) from reliable sources of independent authors who both praise Churchill and point out the book's limitations, so the tag is no longer needed. These additions have certainly improved the article so we can be grateful to Chowbok for the guidance. Given the amount that has now been published about Churchill's History by David Reynolds and others, there is plenty of room for extending the article to GA and beyond. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:55, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Synopsis

Is there a synopsis which compares the six volume edition with the condensed one? --37.24.11.29 (talk) 00:53, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Dictation

" Once all was collected and collated, Churchill began writing in earnest, dictating almost all of the work, with the notable exception of several long passages in Volume I."

This is a pretty dubious claim from a 40-year old book. John Keegan is mistaken. More detailed accounts are pretty clear (and more plausible) that the books, or at any rate the first draft thereof, were almost entirely written by his "research assistants" (my recollection is that there were two teams, civil and military, headed up by William Deakin and ?Pug Ismay - the old trick of having a "ghostwriter in chief" to "give the book one voice" as they say in the trade). Churchill's contribution was tweaking and tightening up the prose on the galley proofs - one of Martin Gilbert's books contains a photo of a galley proof on the Battle of the Atlantic, with Churchill's handwritten amendments.

As far back as the interwar period Churchill, like many bestselling writers of both fact and (strange but true) fiction, was relying heavily on the contributions of researchers for "The World Crisis" and his "Marlborough" which as somebody once remarked contains "far too many chunks of undigested ghostwritten material" (or words to that effect). I actually read the "History of the Second World War" right through in 2003 - took me about 7 months to get through it - and the idea that Churchill dictated it is pretty implausible. Every so often the book breaks into a passage of rhetoric which he may well have dictated himself. But on the other extreme is the chapter on the technical aspects of radar, "chaff", beams etc, which he so obviously didn't write himself that the writing team wink at the reader by frequently inserting the phrase "my understanding is ...."

Yes, I know Randolph later won a libel action against somebody who pointed out that the books were largely ghosted. That sort of thing is why London used to be the libel capital of the world. Paulturtle (talk) 04:09, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Have added some stuff from Peter Clarke's study of Churchill's literary career. He actually doesn't say all that much about "The Second World War" because - he says - David Reynolds "In Command of History" covers the technical aspects of how the book was actually written. My copy of that book is boxed up somewhere. Andrew Roberts 2018 biography has some not particularly earth-shattering commentary. Jonathan Rose "The Literary Churchill" has a few bits and pieces and David Lough "No More Champagne" (a study of Churchill's finances) probably has more to say on the money side of things.Paulturtle (talk) 05:19, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

He does seem to have had a bit more input into the early volumes than I'd remembered, although much less so for the final volumes. It's all covered in the article now.Paulturtle (talk) 05:39, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

References

David Reynolds - One Source

Somebody tagged this article for excessive reliance on "one source", David Reynolds "In Command of History". I've added other material, but the reliance on Reynolds is, I think, unavoidable as it is a groundbreaking commentary. Peter Clarke, in his study of Churchill's career as an author, states explicitly that he wrote less than he would have done about this work as it was so comprehensively covered by Reynolds. It may well be that the Reynolds book, which I don't immediately have to hand, goes into more detail about the process by which these volumes were compiled, a topic on which I've added stuff from other books.

I don't intend to do any more work on this article unless I come across anything relevant, not least as it is already getting pretty long. Paulturtle (talk) 05:39, 9 September 2024 (UTC)