Brendan Bracken

Despite his encomiums to Joan, Churchill rated Napoleon higher, with Georges Clemenceau a close third—and, a bit farther down, de Gaulle.

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.

Lawrence “was indeed a dweller upon the mountain tops…and where the view on clear days commands all the Kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” —WSC

We all benefit from Hillsdale’s twenty-three volumes of The Churchill Documents, Robert Rhodes James’s Complete Speeches and the 332 Churchill articles in the Collected Essays. Vital as these contributions are, they do not capture everything Churchill wrote or said. There is far more. The task I set myself, all those years ago, was to find everything else, too. - Ronald Cohen

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.

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

He combined two qualities: generous loyalty to those he loved, and an acid tongue and pen for those he didn’t. Most of the latter, I tend to think, richly deserved what they got. Randolph Churchill’s public persona was based on the latter quality. In the mid-1950s, surgery revealed that a tumor on his lung was benign. His friend Evelyn Waugh burst into the bar at White’s Club: “They’ve cut out the only part of Randolph that isn’t malignant!”

In 1911, a time of great political division, Churchill and F.E. Smith founded The Other Club, a collegial dining group for members of both parties. It's still going strong.