Churchill

As a young man, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill set out to become a hero – he would exceed everyone’s expectations, save perhaps his own. Few statesmen have received so many honours as he did over the course of his career. Although several statesmen have received the Nobel Peace Prize, none apart from Churchill have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His was a career that had no parallel in British history for richness, range, length and achievement.
Churchill took a leading part in laying the foundations of the welfare state in Britain, in preparing the Royal Navy for World War I, and in settling the political boundaries in the Middle East after the war. In World War II he emerged as the leader of the resistance against German domination of Europe and as a prime architect of victory. In this, and in the later struggle against communism, he made himself an indispensable link between the British and American peoples. However Brenda Ralph Lewis’s study is no hagiography, and Churchill’s many errors and misjudgements are covered in full.
With 190 colour and black-and-white photographs, many of them seldom seen, Churchill – An Illustrated Life covers the whole of the life of this most colourful of men, a statesman whose range of achievements is unlikely to be matched.