Winston Churchill’s 1953 Nobel literature citation read “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory defending exalted human values” (Novelist politicians, 9 May). As historian David Reynolds has detailed, the six volumes of Churchill’s history of the second world war were built upon selective memory forged out of ego, not least the “great man’s” fleeting memory of the 1943 Bengal famine, in which more than 3.5 million people perished, to a large extent as a direct consequence of Churchill’s policies and actions. His hatred of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent is a matter of record. His gifts as a writer were not profound but he was good at booms and bangs. Not then, one of the Nobel committee’s better choices for the literature prize. And certainly not, had it been offered, for the peace prize.
Bruce Ross-Smith
Oxford
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