Churchill : Walking with Destiny – Roberts Andrew (2019)

Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many considered him the greatest man in the world. More than a thousand biographies of Churchill already exist, but Andrew Roberts draws on over forty new sources, including the private diaries of King George VI, which no previous biography has used, to portray him more intimately and persuasively than its predecessors. The book does not conceal Churchill’s faults, allowing readers to appreciate his virtues and character in full: his titanic capacity for work and drink, ability to see the big picture, willingness to take risks and insistence on being where the action was, good humour even in the most desperate circumstances, the breadth and strength of his friendships, and extraordinary tendency to burst into tears at unexpected moments. Above all, it reveals the wellsprings of his personality: his lifelong desire to please his father, even long after his father’s death, his aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost everyone else, his love of the British Empire, and his sense of history and its connection to the present. During the Second World War, Churchill summoned a particular scientist several times for technical advice. “It was the same whenever we met,” the young man wrote. “I had a feeling of being recharged by a source of living power.” Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s emissary, wrote, “Wherever he was, there was a battlefront.” Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill’s essential strategic partner and most severe private critic, wrote in his diary, “I thank God I was given such an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.”