Sir Winston S. Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."
Over a 64-year span, Churchill published over 40 books, many multi-volume definitive accounts of historical events to which he was a witness and participant. All are beautifully written and as accessible and relevant today as when first published.
During his fifty-year political career, Churchill served twice as Prime Minister in addition to other prominent positions—including President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Home Secretary. In the 1930s, Churchill was one of the first to recognize the danger of the rising Nazi power in Germany and to campaign for rearmament in Britain. His leadership and inspired broadcasts and speeches during World War II helped strengthen British resistance to Adolf Hitler—and played an important part in the Allies’ eventual triumph.
One of the most inspiring wartime leaders of modern history, Churchill was also an orator, a historian, a journalist, and an artist. All of these aspects of Churchill are fully represented in this collection of his works.
Only a handful of times during World War II was the situation so dire that the House of Commons had to meet secretly-to keep its counsel from reaching the enemy. Five separate times during the war, between 1940 and 1942, Winston Churchill addressed the secret assembly. Those speeches are reproduced in this collection.Here, Churchill delivers his immediate reactions to the fall of France, the discovery of a vast enemy armada in the English Channel, and the fall of Singapore, which may have been the most heartbreaking and costly military failure of Churchill's career. Readers can glean a startling intimate insight into Churchill's thinking by noting the words and phrases he chose to omit as well as those he included. Originally published in 1945, Churchill's words provide fascinating context to some of World War II's most significant events-and still carry great weight and meaning today.
As a young, ambitious soldier, Winston Churchill managed to get himself posted to the 21st Lancers in 1899 as a war correspondent for the Morning Post--and joined them in fighting the rebel Boer settlers in South Africa. In this conflict, rebel forces in the Transvaal and Orange Free State had proclaimed their own statehood,calling it the Boer Republic.
This book is actually two separate works in one. Perhaps the most riveting personal account is found in London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, where Churchill is captured in Pretoria not long after he arrives to join the British forces--and is frustrated not by the conditions in the prison, but by the fact that he was missing the action. Churchill tells the story of how he escaped and made a daring overland crossing, traveling only at night to avoid detection. More a recounting of his own personal adventures and observations than a comprehensive history of the conflict, this book is nonetheless fascinating for both its historical and personal perspective.
Churchill Sizes Up the Giants of His Age, Offers Wisdom for Our OwnWinston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the strength of "his mastery of historical and biographical description." Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries (1937), which features Churchill’s brief lives of those he called "Great Men of our age."Great Contemporaries profiles towering figures ranging from Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia, and Leon Trotsky to Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. This edition includes five essays that have never appeared in any previous version, some thirty black-and-white photographs, and an enlightening introduction and annotations by noted Churchill scholar James W. Muller.Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, the essays in Great Contemporaries focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege. Churchill’s keen observations take on new importance in our own age of roiling political change.Ultimately, Great Contemporaries provides fascinating insight into the statesman’s perspective. Churchill’s objective is clear: he tries to learn from these giants in order to discover what makes a man great. He approaches his subjects with a measuring eye, finding their limitations at least as revealing as their merits.
