The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children.
Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides—and Winston Churchill.
Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history.
Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle.
Hitler brought them together; later in the war, they drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their alliance, the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was one of the most inspiring leaders of the twentieth century, and one of its greatest wits. War reporter, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime Minister, Nobel Laureate, wordplay enthusiast, he was a powerful man of many words. Throughout his life, he moved, entertained, and sometimes enraged people with his notorious wit and razor-sharp tongue. Consequently, he is one of the most oft-quoted and misquoted leaders in recent history. Now in paperback, Churchill by Himself is the first fully annotated and attributed collection of Churchill sayings—edited by longtime Churchill scholar Richard M. Langworth and authorized by the Churchill estate—that captures Churchill's wit in its entirety.
In Churchill, Roy Jenkins provides a comprehensive portrait of Winston Churchill from his childhood to the critical World War II period and beyond in a single, definitive volume. Roy Jenkins combines unparalleled command of British political history and his own high level government experience in a narrative account of Churchill's astounding career that is unmatched in its shrewd insights, its unforgettable anecdotes, the clarity of its overarching themes, and the author's nuanced appreciation of his extraordinary subject.
Exceptional in its breadth of knowledge and distinguished in its stylish wit and penetrating intelligence, Churchill is one of the finest political biographies of our time.
An extremely entertaining compendium of bon mots, anecdotes, and trivia about Winston Churchill from a leading Churchill lecturer and performer — useful for speakers, students, of history, and World War II buffs, as well as general readers.
Distilled from years of meticulous research and documentation, filled with material unavailable when the earliest books of the official biography's eight volumes went to press, Churchill is a brilliant marriage of the hard facts of the public life and the intimate details of the private man. The result is a vital portrait of one of the most remarkable men of any age as well as a revealing depiction of a man of extraordinary courage and imagination.
After publishing the eighth and final volume of Churchill's official biography in 1988, Martin Gilbert was finally free to devote himself to his own one-volume account of this compelling life. The result is a brilliant marriage of the hard facts of the public life and intimate details of the private man--a vital portrait of one of the most remarkable men of any age. Photographs.
The quintessential account of the Second World War as seen by Winston Churchill, its greatest leader
As Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1940 to 1945, Winston Churchill was not only the most powerful player in World War II but also the free world's most eloquent voice of defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny. Churchill's epic accounts of those times, remarkable for their grand sweep and incisive firsthand observations, are distilled here in a single essential volume. Memoirs of the Second World War is a vital and illuminating work that retains the drama, eyewitness details, and magisterial prose of his classic six-volume history and offers an invaluable view of pivotal events of the twentieth century.
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. With penetrating insight and vivid anecdotes, Gretchen Rubin makes Churchill accessible and meaningful to twenty-first-century readers by analyzing the many 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.
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. It brings to full realization the depiction of a man too fabulous for any novelist to construct, too complex for even the longest narrative to describe, and too significant ever to be forgotten.
First published in 1899 and revised for the 1902 edition by its author Winston Churchill, this history of the River War in Sudan vividly chronicles the military campaign that altered the destinies of England, Egypt, and the Arabian peoples in northeast Africa.
More by accident than design, in Churchill’s view, England was drawn into the affairs of Egypt in the 1880s, for at the same historical moment that the English, under Lord Cromer, were granted virtually sovereign power to establish a sound government in Egypt and to stimulate its national economy, the Mahdi rebelled in the Egyptian suzerainty of Sudan. Violence and bloodshed ensued, and the English soon found themselves embroiled alongside their Egyptian ally in a bitter conflict with the fiercely nationalistic Mahdi—a conflict that culminated in the massacre of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum and the emergence of the fanatical regime known as the Dervish Empire.
In this illuminating volume, Churchill not only dramatically relates the catastrophic events in Sudan’s 1880s, but also places them in the context of Sudanese history. So it is that his subsequent account of the reconquest and pacification of Sudan by a mixed Anglo-Egyptian force under the command of Sir Herbert Kitchener weds history to destiny, as the outcome of the River War for decades would link Great Britain to the uneasy future of Egypt and Sudan.
Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the strength of “his mastery of historical and biographical description.” Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries(1937), which features Churchill’s brief lives of those he called “Great Men of our age.”
ISI Books is proud to publish a brand-new, illustrated edition of this neglected classic. Great Contemporaries profiles towering figures ranging from Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia, and Leon Trotsky to Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. This edition—the first in twenty years—includes five essays that have never appeared in any previous version, some thirty black-and-white photographs, and an enlightening introduction and annotations by noted Churchill scholar James W. Muller.
Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, the essays in Great Contemporaries focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege. Churchill’s keen observations take on new importance in our own age of roiling political change.
Ultimately, Great Contemporaries provides fascinating insight into the statesman’s perspective. Churchill’s objective is clear: he tries to learn from these giants what makes a man great. He approaches his subjects with a measuring eye, finding their limitations at least as revealing as their merits.
This handsome new edition of Great Contemporaries brings back Churchill’s unmatched insights and unforgettable prose for a new generation of readers and leaders.
In his landmark biography of Winston Churchill, acclaimed historian John Keegan offers a very human portrait of one of the twentieth century's enduring symbols of heroic defiance. From Churchill's youth as a poor student to his leadership during World War II, Keegan reveals a man whose own idea of an English past—eloquently embodied in his speeches—allowed him to exhort a nation to unprecedented levels of sacrifice. The result is a uniquely discerning look at one of the most fascinating personalities in history.
“The best military historian of our generation.” –Tom Clancy
Here, in his own words, are the fascinating first thirty years in the life of one of the most provocative and compelling leaders of the twentieth century
Winston Churchill
As a visionary, statesman, and historian, and the most eloquent spokesman against Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill was one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. In this autobiography, Churchill recalls his childhood, his schooling, his years as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer War, and his first forays into politics as a member of Parliament. My Early Life not only gives readers insights into the shaping of a great leader but, as Churchill himself wrote, "a picture of a vanished age."
If you want to fully understand Winston Churchill, My Early Life is essential reading.
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