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Books
A Century and More of Churchill Art
09
Oct
2017
By KATIE DAVENPORT
Jonathan Black's book provides some interesting glimpses into Churchill's life and personality in art, though one has to wade through some disorganization to find said moments. With some guidance and revision, his book might have captured a more accurate portrayal of the titan of many moods and many faces.
“Leading Lives: Winston Churchill” – by Fiona Reynoldson
02
Oct
2017
By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
Fiona Reynoldson’s "Winston Churchill", for ages 8-15, is far and away the best juvenile ever published, anywhere, by anybody. Throughout, the author delivers unadulterated, factual information. One wouldn’t expect so much wisdom to be so attractively wedged into sixty-four pages. We should all buy five copies and get them into the hands of schools, libraries and young people of promise.
Winston Churchill as Sancho Panza?
02
Oct
2017
“Damn the Dardanelles, they will be our grave.” – Admiral Fisher
25
Sep
2017
By BARRY GOUGH
Britain’s mercurial First Sea Lord in 1915 was nothing if not vociferous, and often indulged in exaggeration. But for Fisher and the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, the Dardanelles proved to be just that, almost. Here is an insightful inquiry by noted naval historian Christopher Bell of Dalhousie University. His account of the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign is welcome testimony to how Winston Churchill’s career was temporarily ruined by events beyond his control. All the same, the book reminds us that at the time, Churchill’s critics, growing in strength and number, regarded him as a danger to British futures.
“Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom” – by Thomas Ricks
14
Sep
2017
By ANDREW ROBERTS
Although Winston Churchill and George Orwell never met or even corresponded, the American military historian Thomas Ricks has linked them in a book subtitled The Fight for Freedom. He fully accepts that they were “vastly dissimilar men, with very different life trajectories.” Churchill, the older by twenty-eight years, was much more robust, extroverted and oratorically fluent than Orwell, whom Ricks depicts as having a “phlegmatic and introverted personality.” It is true that Orwell named the hero of 1984 “Winston,” and that Churchill enjoyed the book so much he read it twice. But is that really enough of a connection to justify an entire book?
“The Grand Deception” – by Tom Curran
14
Sep
2017
1
By CHRISTOPHER M. BELL
"The premise of the work is hardly original: Churchill, we are told, was personally and solely responsible for both the ill-fated Dardanelles offensive and the disastrous Gallipoli campaign that followed from it. This charge has haunted Churchill since 1915. But according to Curran, historians writing since the late 1960s—when British official records were opened to public scrutiny —have not recognized the full extent of Churchill’s culpability. Curran’s mission is to set the record straight."
“Churchill and the Jews” – by Michael J. Cohen
14
Sep
2017
1
By DANIEL MANDEL
As it stands, "Churchill and the Jews" offers a wealth of detail and analysis with some thought-provoking arguments and it scores a few hits. But it is ultimately defective in its judgment and marred by the prosecutorial tendency of discounting alternative interpretations of the evidence.
“Churchill, Roosevelt and Company: Studies in Character and Statecraft” – by Lewis E. Lehrman
06
Sep
2017
By WILLIAM JOHN SHEPHERD
Lehrman examines Churchill and Roosevelt through the teams they assembled: advisers, political officials and military leaders who worked for victory even as they argued over war strategy. His is not a history of the war, but an evaluation of people, decisions and events, a victory followed by a lost peace and decades of Cold War. A useful chronology and extensive endnotes, bibliography, and index are complemented by portrait photographs used as chapter headings, and two key appendices: a 1940 Roosevelt fireside chat, and Churchill’s victory speech in 1945.
“Churchill and the Bomb” – by Kevin Ruane
17
Feb
2017
By GRAHAM FARMELO
“There are many valuable accounts of Churchill’s nuclear thinking during his second premiership, notably in books by Klaus Larres and Peter Hennessey. But, for me, the account Ruane gives here is outstanding for the breadth of its scholarship, the richness of its narrative and the acuity of its judgements.”
“Churchill: The Life” – by Max Arthur
10
Feb
2017
By CHRISTOPHER HARMON
When a photo editor considers creating a Churchill “pictorial biography,” is he ever deterred by the stacks of just such books accumulating along shelves of libraries since the 1940s? One cannot be sure, but Max Arthur has been “toiling in the Churchill vineyard” for many years. There must be a hundred picture books dedicated to Churchill. After all, he lived his entire life in the era of the camera. In this new volume, about 260 pages hold photographs, a few in color. The large format gives great impact to many we’ve seen before, but the print quality, the lighting, is enhanced.
“Churchill & Ireland” – by Paul Bew
03
Feb
2017
By ROBERT COURTS MP
It is a good sign of a book’s quality when readers wonder why points so obvious have never before been made. Indeed it seems incredible that Churchill’s long, multi-layered and ambiguous relationship with Ireland has never before received the detailed and forensic treatment that Paul Bew now provides us. His book is readable, reliable, and brings new perspectives to the topic. For example, Lord Bew points out that Gallipoli, usually seen as an tragedy for the Australia New Zealand Army Corps, produced stirrings of nationhood in the Emerald Isle as great as in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Few historians have addressed this point before. Lord Bew reminds us that Churchill was intimately involved in the Curragh Mutiny, and the incredibly sensitive Irish negotiations up to the outbreak of the First World War—and that this formed his “training” in handling nationalist extremism and domestic political violence.