Combat, cigars, and whiskeyÑfrom the jungles of Cuba and the mountains of the Northwest Frontier, to the banks of the Nile and the plains of South Africa, comes this action-packed tale of Winston ChurchillÕs adventures as a war correspondent in the Age of Empire.
Long before his finest hour as Britain's wartime leader, Winston Churchill emerged on the world stage as a brazen foreign correspondent, covering wars of empire in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa. In those far-flung corners of the world, reporting from the front lines between 1895 and 1900, Churchill mastered his celebrated command of language and formed strong opinions about war. He thought little of his own personal safety, so convinced was he of his destiny, jumping at any chance to be where bullets flew and canons roared. "I have faith in my star that I am intended to do something in the world," he wrote to his mother at the age of twenty-three before heading into battle. Based on his private letters and war reportage, Winston Churchill Reporting intertwines young Winston's daring exploits in combat, adventures in distant corners of the globe, and rise as a major literary talent experiences that shaped the world leader he was to become.
This fascinating collection of reportage chronicles the Prime Minister’s life through the newspaper where he began his career. The Telegraph had a uniquely close connection with Winston Churchill at every stage of his life. Beginning with his early days as a war correspondent for the paper, the association continued as he himself became the news—reported on in its pages at every stage of his historic political career. Collected here, for the first time, is the best reportage on this complex man. Unencumbered by the legendary status he would later acquire, there is praise and blame in equal measure: finding space for both dramatic accounts of his wartime premiership and affectionate reports on the animals living at Chartwell, his country estate. The Telegraph was also a happy home for Churchill the journalist, and featured within are many pieces written in his unmistakable prose. Capturing the urgency of the time in which he lived, Churchill at the Telegraph is a celebration of an intimate relationship that lasted over sixty years and shows Winston Churchill in all his paradoxical glory.
No statesman shaped the twentieth century more than Winston Churchill. To know the full Churchill is to understand the combination of boldness and caution, of assertiveness and humility, that defines statesmanship at its best. With fresh perspective and insights based on decades of studying and teaching Churchill, Larry P. Arnn explores the greatest challenges faced by Churchill over the course of his extraordinary career, both in war and peace—and always in the context of Churchill’s abiding dedication to constitutionalism. Churchill’s Trial is organized around the three great challenges to liberty that Churchill faced: Nazism, Soviet communism, and his own nation’s slide toward socialism. Churchill knew that stable free government, long enduring, is rare, and hangs upon the balance of many factors ever at risk. Combining meticulous scholarship with an engrossing narrative arc, this book holds timely lessons for today. Arnn says, “Churchill’s trial is also our trial. We have a better chance to meet it because we had in him a true statesman.” In a scholarly, timely, and highly erudite way, Larry Arnn puts the case for Winston Churchill continuing to be seen as statesman from whom the modern world can learn important lessons. In an age when social and political morality seems all too often to be in a state of flux, Churchill’s Trial reminds us of the enduring power of the concepts of courage, duty, and honor. --Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Napoleon: A Life and The Storm of War Larry Arnn has spent a lifetime studying the life and accomplishments of Winston Churchill. In his lively Churchill’s Trial, Arnn artfully reminds us that Churchill was not just the greatest statesman and war leader of the twentieth century, but also a pragmatic and circumspect thinker whose wisdom resonates on every issue of our times. --Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University In absorbing, gracefully written historical and biographical narration, Larry Arnn shows that Churchill, often perceived as inconsistent and opportunistic, was in fact philosophically rigorous and consistent at levels of organization higher and deeper than his detractors are capable of imagining. In Churchill’s Trial Arnn has rendered great service not only to an incomparable statesman but to us, for the magnificent currents that carried Churchill through his trials are as admirable, useful, and powerful in our times as they were in his. --Mark Helprin, New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and In Sunlight and in Shadow Churchill’s Trial, a masterpiece of political philosophy and practical statesmanship, is the one book on Winston Churchill that every undergraduate, every graduate student, every professional historian, and every member of the literate general public should read on this greatest statesman of the twentieth century. The book is beautifully written, divided into three parts–war, empire, peace–and thus covers the extraordinary life of Winston Churchill and the topics which define the era of his statesmanship. --Lewis E. Lehrman, cofounder of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and distinguished director of the Abraham Lincoln Association
When the war was declared in August 1914, one of the first acts to be implemented by the politicians and military was a strict censorship on the newspapers. As the poacher turned gamekeeper, Winston Churchill said: The war is going to be fought in a fog and the best place for correspondence about the war is London, The military sought to have one of their officers, dubbed “Eyewitness”, to be the official spokesman to enable them to control what the newspapers could print. In the early stages of the war, there were many reporters on the Continent who were evading military arrest and sending back reports about the reality of the situation. Several volunteered with the various ambulance services just to disguise their real purpose, but all were eventually banished. Having finally cleared all reporters from fighting area, the military was persuaded to allow a small number of accredited war reporters to be chaperoned around the battle fronts. They were closely watched and their reports thoroughly scrutinised, until they eventually became almost a part of the Headquarters hierarchy. Later, diaries and letters revealed how many of them really felt and they had to bear the post-war shame of not writing the truth. The Western Front was not the only front in this world war. Reporters found censorship less rigidly applied on the Eastern Front, Palestine and Italy. One correspondent, whose reports famously brought about the sacking of the campaign commander and the ending of the fruitless and bloody Gallipoli Expedition, bravely broke ranks and was finished as a war reporter. War reporting was not confined to print. The emergence of photographers and cinematographers on the battlefield has left us with an extraordinary record. Unlike their writing brothers, the photographers could get close to the action and shoot what they liked. The resultant film was, of course, censored but thankfully nothing was discarded and museum archives are full of their stunning work. Having been the pre-war stars of their newspapers, the war reporters experienced a post-war wave of anger and cynicism which took years to overcome.
This enchanting collection brings together hundreds of Churchill's wittiest remarks as a record of all that was best about this endearing, conceited, talented and wildly funny Englishman.
Warrior and writer, genius and crank, rider in the British cavalry’s last great charge and inventor of the tank—Winston Churchill led Britain to fight alone against Nazi Germany in the fateful year of 1940 and set the standard for leading a democracy at war. Like no other portrait of its famous subject, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is a dazzling display of facts more improbable than fiction, and an investigation of the contradictions and complexities that haunt biography. Gretchen Craft Rubin gives readers, in a single volume, the kind of rounded view usually gained only by reading dozens of conventional biographies. With penetrating insight and vivid anecdotes, Rubin makes Churchill accessible and meaningful to twenty-first-century readers with forty contrasting views of the man: he was an alcoholic, he was not; he was an anachronism, he was a visionary; he was a racist, he was a humanitarian; he was the most quotable man in the history of the English language, he was a bore. In crisp, energetic language, Rubin creates a new form for presenting a great figure of history—and brings to full realization the depiction of a man too fabulous for any novelist to construct, too complicated for even the longest narrative to describe, and too valuable ever to be forgotten.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A major reassessment of Winston Churchill that examines his lasting influence in politics and culture. Churchill is generally considered one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century, if not the greatest of all, revered for his opposition to appeasement, his defiance in the face of German bombing of England, his political prowess, his deft aphorisms, and his memorable speeches. He became the savior of his country, as prime minister during the most perilous period in British history, World War II, and is now perhaps even more beloved in America than in England. And yet Churchill was also very often in the wrong: he brazenly contradicted his own previous political stances, was a disastrous military strategist, and inspired dislike and distrust through much of his life. Before 1939 he doubted the efficacy of tank and submarine warfare, opposed the bombing of cities only to reverse his position, shamelessly exploited the researchers and ghostwriters who wrote much of the journalism and the books published so lucratively under his name, and had an inordinate fondness for alcohol that once found him drinking whisky before breakfast. When he was appointed to the cabinet for the first time in 1908, a perceptive journalist called him “the most interesting problem of personal speculation in English politics.” More than a hundred years later, he remains a source of adulation, as well as misunderstanding. This revelatory new book takes on Churchill in his entirety, separating the man from the myth that he so carefully cultivated, and scrutinizing his legacy on both sides of the Atlantic. In effervescent prose, shot through with sly wit, Geoffrey Wheatcroft illuminates key moments and controversies in Churchill’s career—from the tragedy of Gallipoli, to his shocking imperialist and racist attitudes, dealings with Ireland, support for Zionism, and complicated engagement with European integration. Charting the evolution and appropriation of Churchill’s reputation through to the present day, Churchill’s Shadow colorfully renders the nuance and complexity of this giant of modern politics.
Although remembered and even lauded in the public mind as the British prime minister during the Second World War who played a major role in Allied victory over the Axis Powers and Japan, Winston Churchill had a life and political career before 1939 conditioned by fighting other wars and, in peacetime, thinking about war. While historians debate his achievements and failures between 1939 and 1945, a less explored dimension is Churchill’s earlier connexion with war and warfare. This book explores Churchill’s earlier experience in fighting wars as a soldier and politician.
A books which traces Churchill's life in the news from cradle to grave, showing how tensions between tradition and novelty played into his constantly evolving media image.