Books

McKercher and Capet have provided a collection of substantive and challenging essays. Their book offers many useful observations that will stimulate further historical discussion and scholarship.

"Working with Winston: The Unsung Women," by Cita Stelzer, shows the importance Churchill attached to everything, from routine domestic matters to the terror of imminent extinction. This book is essential to understand the rounded picture.

This is just a representative fraction of Piers Brendon’s comprehensive book. He avoids repeating material in several previous accounts, and goes much deeper into the subject. Most of the anecdotes have not appeared previously and are thus quite valuable. Anyone interested in the personal side of the great man owes it to themselves to buy a copy.

Both Churchill and Chamberlain understood that Nazi Germany was a time bomb. But whereas Chamberlain imagined that it could be defused by diplomacy, Churchill believed that it could only be defused by force, or the threat of force. When the diplomacy of appeasement failed Chamberlain was compelled to accept—albeit with the profound reluctance of a man who loathed war—that no other response was possible. In the final analysis the British Empire, which was already in decline, had to be sacrificed so that Britain itself could live.

Why would Hamilton raise the inconsequential to the significant? With admirers like this, Churchill’s memory needs no enemies.

Among many close personal friendships that Churchill enjoyed in political and military life, one of the more unlikely was with a former foe, the South African statesman Jan Christian Smuts. Richard Steyn has offered a plethora of new information and insights in a readable account of this important friendship.

“Churchill was not a great artist, but he was a very accomplished painter,” states Cannadine in this study of Churchill’s art through his and others’ writings.

Von Heyking offers an interesting scholarly work that places Churchill’s many political friendships within a philosophical grounding.

In the best biography since 1991, Roberts's witty, fluent, flowing prose captures the adventure, energy, and incessant movement that Churchill produced.

The relationship between Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee deserves a thorough study. John Bew’s biography succeeds better than David Cohen’s comparison.

The director of the Churchill Archives Center examines Churchill’s decision-making methods on challenges and problems of the Second World War.

Henry George was a hero to the Progressives, yet he, like Churchill, wished to preserve individual liberty through fairer methods of taxation.