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GREAT CONTEMPORARIES -- Winston S. Churchill--Putnam ($4).

Winston Churchill's Great Contemporaries is a collection of 21 essays, product of eight years of scattered writings, on various figures of importance in recent European political history, by England's irrepressible bad boy of politics. He is soundest in his estimates of older statesmen and most informative in his reminiscences of personal contacts with World War generals. But as Author Churchill approaches the present his passionate conservatism leads him increasingly astray from accepted opinion. He defends as a "forlorn" patriot the opera bouffe Boris Savinkov (prerevolutionary Russian spy who worked both for the Tsarist police and for Nihilists, reported on each to the other and had to maintain card files to keep his machinations straight); represents the fun-loving, light-witted Alfonso XIII of Spain (chiefly notable during his reign for his gambols on the Riviera, his gambling at Deauville) as a monarch "cool, determined . . . dauntless," generally much misunderstood.

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