“From Roy Jenkins’s masterly biography, we emerge marveling at the manifold gifts that informed Churchill’s genius for leadership.”—Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review
“One might wonder whether anything fresh remains to be said about Winston Churchill, but Roy Jenkins uniquely combines the skills of a master biographer with the insights of a practical politician and draws a fresh portrait of the great Englishman with authority, elegance, and wit. This is far and away Churchill’s best one-volume biography.”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
“This is a splendid addition to Churchillian lore, a chronicle full of revealing personal anecdotes, delightful wartime vignettes, and fascinating new insights into the critical 1939-1945 years.”—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“Wryly astute… shrewd.”—The Washington Post
“Jenkins catches Churchill’s studied self-inspection with the sure-shot sharpness of an expert portraitist.”—Simon Schama, The New York Review of Books
“Churchill stands forth with Shakespearean bravura as the necessary hero for the most testing moment of national (and world) crisis. A satisfying summation of an unsurpassed life.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune
List of Illustrations
Preface
Glossary of Parliamentary Terms
PART ONE A Brash Young Man 1874-1908
1. A Doubtful Provenance
2. Subaltern of Empire and Journalist of Opportunity
3. Oldham and South Africa
4. Tory into Liberal
5. Convert into Minister
6. An Upwardly Mobile Under-Secretary
PART TWO The Glow-worm Glows: The Morning was Golden 1908-1914
7. Two Hustings and an Altar
8. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice at the Board of Trade
9. A Young Home Secretary
10. From Prisons to Warships
11. ‘The Ruler of the King’s Navee’
12. Churchill in Asquithland
PART THREE The Noontide was Bronze 1914-1918
13. A Flailing First Lord
14. Last Months at the Admiralty
15. Finished at Forty?
16. An Improbable Colonel and a Misjudged Re-entry
17. Lloyd George’s Ambulance Wagon Arrives a Little Late
18. Making the Most of Munitions
PART FOUR Hesitant Afternoon Sunshine 1919-1939
19. Anti-Bolshevik Crusader and Irish Peacemaker
20. A Politician without a Party or a Seat
21. Gold and Strikes
22. A Relentless Writer
23. Cuckoo out of the Nest
24. Unwisdom in the Wilderness
25. An Early Alarm Clock
26. Arms and the Covenant
27. From the Abdication to Munich
28. The Last Year of the Peace
PART FIVE The Saviour of his Country and the Light of the World? 1939-1945
29. Quiet War with Germany and Uneasy Peace with Chamberlain
30. Through Disaster in the Fjords to Triumph in Downing Street
31. Twenty-One Days in May
32. The Terrible Beauty of the Summer of 1940
33. The Battle of Britain and the Beginning of the Blitz
34. No Longer Alone
35. The Anglo-American Marriage Ceremony
36. The Hinge Year
37. 1943: From Casablanca to Teheran
38. The Return to France
39. The Beginning of the End
40. Victory in Europe and Defeat in Britain
PART SIX Was the Evening Leaden? 1945-1965
41. ‘The English Patient’
42. Two Elections and a Resurrection
43. A Consensual Government
44. ‘An Aeroplane … with the Petrol Running Out’
45. A Celebration and a Last Exit
46. The Sun Sinks Slow, How Slowly
References
Select Bibliography
Index
