Official history: how Churchill and the cabinet office wrote The Second World War.

Winston Churchill published The Second World War between 1948 and 1954. Much more than memoirs, his six volumes included a large amount of Churchill's wartime documents and drew extensively on material in the Whitehall archives. This was only possible because of a unique partnership between Churchill and two cabinet secretaries, Edward Bridges and Norman Brook. The assistance that they provided, and their reasons for doing so, are explored in this article, which is based on research in the Churchill papers and the files of the cabinet office. This story also throws light on the general procedures for official vetting of political memoirs as they have evolved during the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]