Narrates the interplay of Winston Churchill’s profession as amateur historian and Parliament pursuits, focusing on the writing of the History of English–speaking Peoples (HESP). Taking to journalism and authorship as cheaper than the military and yet sufficient to finance his aristocratic lifestyle, Churchill sought for fame to improve his negotiating power. At the outset, he was unconcerned with scholarly treatment of Anglo-Saxons contra Normans and the broader questions English-speaking nationalities, favoring family biographies or expected best-sellers. He composed all of his material; his stylistic influences Gibbon, Johnson, Burke, and Macaulay (ironic in the latter’s opposition to the Duke of Marlborough); but he belonged to no historiographic school. One effect of writing of his father’s biography was to persuade himself of abandoning the family Tory connection. In the interwar cabinet, moreover, he was anti-American. Out of office, he turned to HESP but often took on interim projects for revenue. Clarke recurs to the peculiarities of contemporary taxation and Churchill’s accounting. HESP was largely written, with the assistance of a committee of professionals, in 1938-39, save for volume 4 (which treats of the white dominions), completed in the 1950s. Yet its themes were manifest in wartime rhetoric: men who fight tyranny and barbarism deserve history’s plaudits; freedom and law, individual rights, and the subordination of government to society are the characteristic qualifies of English-speaking nationalities. HESP’s judgements often reveal Churchill’s contemporary politics: Clarke accuses Churchill of Whiggish history, not considering the conservative statemen’s preference for tradition. But he is diligent enough to quote Isaiah Berlin: ‘the single, central, organizing principle of his moral and intellectual universe’ was ‘an historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multi-coloured past’. (See Mr Churchill in 1940.) Chatham is Churchill’s hero; Clarke wonders why the dictatorial Cromwell doesn’t get the same adulation?! There is a persistent tone of professional jealously, and little recognition of Churchill’s statesmanship.