“Like a beaker of champagne,” Harold Nicolson described My Early Life, and Churchill’s account of his life through 1908 still sparkles over a century later.
Cusic tracks every reference to Churchillian music and song. They range from the marches, ditties and Gilbert & Sullivan Churchill loved to his favorite hymns.
Normandy and Beyond leaves us in awe at Churchill’s linguistic fluidity, clarity of thought, sense of humor, impish mischief, foresight, and ability to deal with “nests of cockatrices.”
Normandy and Beyond demonstrates enormous mass of detail Churchill had to deal with around D-Day. Antoine Capet makes a case study of the ever-present de Gaulle problem.
Sandys describes her grandfather’s paintings with four characteristics, which she also applies to his approach to life: bold, irrepressible, loving of life, and inspiring.
Ironically, if not iconically, both were struck down in the midst of triumph: Churchill by the electors, Lincoln by a bullet. “In war you can only be killed once,” Churchill said, “but in politics many times.”
