‘Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times No figure looms larger over twentieth-century British history than Winston Churchill. By the time of his death in 1965, aged 90, many considered him the greatest man in the world — and yet, for all the thousand-plus biographies written about him, Andrew Roberts has produced something genuinely new. Drawing on more than forty previously untapped sources, among them the private diaries of King George VI consulted in no earlier Churchill biography, Roberts paints the most intimate and persuasive portrait yet of this towering personality. THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, ECONOMIST, DAILY TELEGRAPH, EVENING STANDARD, OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR. The result is a magnificently fresh account by one of Britain’s most acclaimed historians — one that neither flinches from Churchill’s considerable faults nor fails to do full justice to his extraordinary virtues. His titanic capacity for work and drink, his instinct for the big picture, his willingness to take risks, his insistence on being at the front of the action, his good humour in the bleakest of circumstances, and his remarkable tendency to weep at unexpected moments are all rendered here with clarity and depth. So too are the deeper forces that shaped him: his lifelong need to earn his father’s approval even after his father’s death, his aristocratic indifference to the views of almost everyone else, his love of the British Empire, and his powerful sense of history’s living connection to the present. Those who worked closest to him understood the charge he generated. A young scientist summoned repeatedly for technical advice during the Second World War recalled: ‘I had a feeling of being recharged by a source of living power.’ Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s emissary, observed simply: ‘Wherever he was, there was a battlefront.’ And Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill’s strategic partner and most candid private critic, wrote in his diary: ‘I thank God I was given such an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.’
ISBN 13: 9780141981253
Author: Andrew Roberts
