T he passing of Sir Martin Gilbert at the age of 78 marked a sad milestone. He achieved popular acclaim as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, the man whose in-depth eight-volume biography served as the gold standard reference work about the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He also was a prolific writer of Jewish history, an observer of world events, and an author of many atlases.
He was an excellent researcher, with a keen eye to detail, who skillfully distilled complex issues into flowing narrative with popular appeal. Randolph began the official biography of his father, leading a team of researchers, which included Gilbert beginning in Randolph and his team wrote two volumes of the biography, and they were disjointed and not very well written.
Gilbert took over the effort and completed the final six volumes of the biography, completely transforming the work and greatly elevating the quality. The full biography was so thorough and rich in detail that it has served as the jumping-off point for virtually every serious scholarly study of Churchill.
The companion volumes are a treasure trove for historians and it costs a bit of treasure to purchase them. He authored derivative works, such as Churchill and America and Churchill and the Jews , but it was his comprehensive biography and edited volumes of supporting selected documents that are his greatest legacies. Of course, his job as official biographer was to unearth facts and present them in a sympathetic light in an appealing narrative, and he accomplished that exceptionally well.
He also was criticized for simply presenting and not analyzing his material, and indeed he was more reliable chronicler than a probing scholar. But it was a chronicle for the ages. He also produced some excellent atlases on Israeli history and the Israel-Arab conflict. When I first met him about two decades ago, it was in Jerusalem. He loved detail, and Israel. Churchill was philo-Semitic and grew to become a leading Zionist, which caused him friction with Conservatives and Socialists alike.
