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.
More than any other book by Winston Churchill, the wide-ranging THOUGHTS AND ADVENTURES allows the contemporary reader to grasp the extraordinary variety and depth of Churchill’s mature thoughts on the questions, both grave and gay, facing modern man.Churchill begins by asking what it would be like to live your life over again and ends by describing his love affair with painting. In between, he touches on subjects as diverse as spies, cartoons, submarines, elections, flying, and the future. Reading these essays—originally dictated late at night in the 1920s in his study, and by which he was able to support his family and live like a lord without inherited wealth—is like being invited to dinner at Churchill’s country seat at Chartwell, where the soup was limpid, Pol Roger Champagne flowed, the pudding had a theme, and Churchill entertained lucky visitors with vivid conversation. With a new introduction and notes by James W. Muller, Academic Chairman of the Churchill Centre, this edition recovers Churchill’s unforgettable table talk for a new generation of readers.
An absorbing history of the outbreak of World War I from a true insider's point of view, the first volume of Sir Winston Churchill's five-volume The World Crisis is unsurpassed as both a historical and personal account of the earth-shaking events leading up to World War I. Beginning in 1911, when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, this report is based on thousands of his personal letters and memos.This first volume of Churchill's epic series opens with a chilling description of the Agadir Crisis, and provides an in-depth account of naval clashes in the Dardanelles, one of Churchill's major military failures. It takes readers from the fierce bloodshed of the Gallipoli campaign to the tragic sinking of the Lusitania and the tide-turning battles of Jutland and Verdun-as well as the USA's entry into the combat theatre. Written in epic, powerful prose, Churchill provides a perspective you won't find anywhere else: a dynamic insider's account of events that would shape the outcome of modern history.
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.
