Articles

Randolph Churchill’s career in journalism lasted thirty-six years. He wrote hundreds of articles, edited seven volumes of his father’s speeches, and published fifteen books, including the first seven narrative and document volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the official biography.

Before Covid-19 leaves our native shores, is there anything that might be learned from Churchillian leadership about our best response to it?

Historical close calls, during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-21, remind us of the role of illness and chance in the fate of nations and their leaders.

I have often wondered however what would have happened if two hundred thousand German storm troops had actually established themselves ashore. The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used Terror, and we were prepared to go all lengths. I intended to use the slogan “You can always take one with you.” - Winston Churchill

The series—a collection of twenty-eight original pieces—attempts to depict the many facets of Churchill’s complex character. The series covers Churchill’s early childhood all the way through his second term as prime minister in the 1950s. Diving into both the public and private side of Churchill’s life, the series balances Churchill’s professional years as a soldier and war correspondent, a writer, a rhetorician, and a statesman with his private interests as a painter, aviation enthusiast, horseman, father, and husband. Hooper offers a complete, yet often overlooked, picture of the national and international icon.

"A delightful happenstance came my way in Australia recently, when I was asked if I were aware of the connection between Grafton, New South Wales, and my grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill. I was not, so he took me down to the River Clarence, and showed me the broken hulk of a ship called Induna. She was the coaster that transported young Winston from Lourenço Marques, Portuguese East Africa (now Maputo, Mozambique) to Durban, South Africa after his dramatic escape from the Boers in December 1899."

He died in 1965 and Clare followed him five years later. Their relationship has been side-lined or ignored by many biographers more interested in politics than in Churchill’s private life. But the bust made by the “Obstreperous Anarchist” forever stands in the hallway of Chartwell. It is mute testimony to a family friendship that endured through tempestuous times.

Churchill was an early and steady supporter of a Channel Tunnel, which was first proposed in 1751. For most of his life he joined in lively and almost continuous discussion of  “a fixed link with the Continent.” Indeed, during the 1924-1929 Conservative government, Churchill was seen as “the leading political advocate of a tunnel.”

The Splendid and the Vile is the story of the London Blitz, from the moment that Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, until the Luftwaffe raid that destroyed the parts of the House of Commons exactly one year later, coincidentally on the same night that Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland.

These are just a few of the classical authors Churchill read in his self-education as a young man. They form an adjunct to the more recent and direct inspirations, the figures of more recent centuries.

Only a statesman with the broad tolerance of Winston Churchill could laugh off Shaw’s politics while acknowledging his literary genius.

Never Flinch, Never Weary, 1951-1965 is the twenty-third volume of documents in the official biography of Winston Churchill. Together with the narrative texts, the work comprises thirty-one volumes in all. It is the last step in a journey that began over half a century ago, but prepared for decades earlier.