Escaped Lion : THE LAST LION : Winston Spencer Churchill Alone, 1932-1940 <i> by William Manchester (Little, Brown: $24.95; 756 pp., illustrated) </i>

Finally it is exasperating: a delectable story grown long-winded to the point of self-indulgence; a book but weakly edited, if edited at all, the publisher bowing away to the high-priced author; a text misleading and patently derivative; a project all the more maddening for its lack of professionalism.

William Manchester plows on, through Volume 2 of 3 on the life and times of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, in the Depression years all but read out the Conservative Party for warning of the Fascist threat while Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made appeasement a dirty word.

These were Churchill’s years of wandering the political wilderness, though hardly so alone as either title or text suggest. Churchill found substantial support in the Foreign Office, in the diplomatic corps, in the War Office and Air Ministry. Indeed, he ran a tidy spy network, which fed him all manner of secret documents which he then used in critical speeches and newspaper articles to embarrass the government.

Manchester has refined his quasi-historical style over the years. He owes much to a handful of sources, more indeed than he can comfortably acknowledge. Rarely have so many pages owed so much to so few--in particular, to Churchill’s official biographers, Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert.

That might be forgiven if Manchester’s book were briskly paced. Sadly, this is no lean and elegant one-volume biography of one of the great men of the 20th Century. It is instead stuffed chockablock with misleading citations, the affectation of foreign words and a rococo writing style that leaves no direct sentence unfestooned with dependent clauses. Consider: “The Stresa Front, the Duce’s handiwork, lay in ruins, and though he himself was to blame, he resigned from the league in a blind rage and sent his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, to Hitler’s Berghof retreat on the Obersalzberg, overlooking the resort town of Berchtesgaden.”

Or the following paragraph:

“Perhaps the most perspective glimpse of Churchill during the Ethiopian crisis is provided by Vincent Sheean, the American foreign correspondent. Sheean, like Churchill, Lloyd George, the writer Michael Arlen--and, later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor--was a friend of Maxine Elliot, a rich, retired actress whose white, terraced villa in Cannes, the Chateau de l’Horizon, offered exotic asylum to celebrities.”

A firmer editor might have applied liposuction: “Vincent Sheean, the American foreign correspondent, provided perhaps the most perceptive glimpse of Churchill during the Ethiopian crisis. Visiting the Cannes villa of retired actress Maxine Elliot where Churchill was vacationing, Sheean wrote . . . .”

And so on.

Buried somewhere under all this wordage is a spanking good story of political exile and redemption, of courage and guile, of great events, of men rising to challenges and succumbing to fears. Finding it can be trying.