Andrew Roberts

The Calgary Churchill statue will celebrate Sir Winston’s prescience in peace, resolution in war, and lifetime quest for liberty and human rights.

“The Churchill Myths” is not about Churchill. It is about how politicians the authors don’t like wrap themselves in Churchill mythology.

Ahistorical attacks like that of the BBC and National Trust strip away a heroic past. When a nation loses its heroes, something in it dies.

Churchill and the media is a larger story than author Toye tells, and the omissions are as disappointing as the assertions are disconcerting.

Smith is clear that Churchill was a believer in a faith. And that faith was at the heart of his appeal to the British people in the Second World War.

With his many achievements, Haldane stood as warning that the apex of politics, there was no such thing as friendship. Except perhaps with Churchill.

If we allow our monuments and memorials and place-names to be torn down because of our present-day views, it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves.

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

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.

It was not a broadcast appeal to the nation. Nothing so vague as that for Winston S. Churchill. It was his order to the Admiralty on 20 May 1940. The Admiralty then formed the Small Vessels Pool, in which private owners registered their craft for the mission and were given routes and charts.

Churchill told the story of his ancestor in beautiful Augustan Age prose, but also discovered new sources and corrected earlier historians’ errors. Mastering foreign language documents, he produced an outstanding work of history as well as literature, one that appealed to an academic as well as to a popular audience. All this came from someone whose father had said: “He has little [claim] to cleverness, to knowledge or any capacity for settled work.”