Churchill - Andrew Roberts

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, ECONOMIST, DAILY TELEGRAPH, EVENING STANDARD, OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

A magnificently fresh and unexpected biography of Churchill, by one of Britain's most acclaimed historians

Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century
British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many
thought him to be the greatest man in the world.

There have been
over a thousand previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts now
draws on over forty new sources, including the private diaries of King
George VI, used in no previous Churchill biography to depict him more
intimately and persuasively than any of its predecessors. The book in no
way conceals Churchill's
faults and it allows the reader to appreciate
his virtues and character in full: his titanic capacity for work (and
drink), his ability see the big picture, his willingness to take risks
and insistence on being where the action was, his good humour even in
the most desperate circumstances, the breadth and strength of his
friendships and his extraordinary propensity to burst into tears at
unexpected moments. Above all, it shows us the wellsprings of his
personality - his lifelong desire to please his father (even long after
his father's death) but aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost
everyone else, his love of the British Empire, his sense of history and
its connection to the present.

During the Second World War,
Churchill summoned a particular scientist to see him several times for technical advice. 'It was the same whenever we met', wrote the young
man, 'I had a feeling of being recharged by a source of living power.'
Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's emissary, wrote 'Wherever he was,
there was a battlefront.' Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's
essential partner in strategy and most severe critic in private, 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.'