Martin Gilbert's magisterial official biography of Sir Winston Churchill is complemented by the Churchill War Papers, a series of documentary volumes which reveal, with a more comprehensive authority than even the best narrative history, how Churchill waged the Second World War. The Ever Widening War deals with the dramatic events of 1941, during which the Second World War engulfed the world. As the year began, Britain stood alone against a conquered continent, facing massive air raids, the threat of invasion, and starvation in the Battle of the Atlantic. Yet by the end of the year, Hitler's cataclysmic surprise attack on Stalin had laid waste to the Soviet Union, and Japan's treachery at Pearl Harbour had brought the United States into the conflict. The war had extended its bounds world wide, and through the gloom of devastating losses, Churchill scented eventual victory. Martin Gilbert's exemplary selection of documents, many of them unpublished and secret at the time, shows Churchill's energy and decisiveness in every aspect of the war, his strategic grasp and the vulnerable, intimate side to his towering and expansive personality.
