I don’t know how I missed the news that Netflix, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer (of Imagine Documentaries) were producing a new four-part documentary to be called Churchill at War.

But when I heard that and then subsequently learned that our friend Andrew Roberts — the world-class historian and sometime writer for these pages, who also happens to be a baron of Belgravia and a member of the House of Lords — was serving as an adviser on the production, I was ecstatic. He even appears in the trailer!

I’ve been recently rereading Roberts’s monumentally good single-volume biography of the great man, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which was published back in 2018. It’s an amazing fact that one can read for hundreds and hundreds of pages and follow Churchill through a long and varied career — which included adventures in Cuba, battles in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and South Africa, and serving in high office and trench fighting during the First World War — without yet reaching the pinnacle moment of his life: May 1940.

I haven’t been a Netflix subscriber in some years, i.e., since that service cracked down on everyone using their Cousin Jimmy’s roommate’s login. But I suppose I may have to take the plunge, at least for a while.

The official trailer for Churchill at War is available on YouTube. The release date is set for December 4.

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