THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA SUNDAY TIMES THE TIMES ECONOMIST DAILY TELEGRAPH EVENING
STANDARD OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR'Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever
written' Dominic Sandbrook Sunday TimesA magnificently fresh and unexpected biography of
Churchill by one of Britain's most acclaimed historians 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 thought him to be the greatest man in the world. There have been over a thousand
previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts now draws on over forty new sources
including the private diaries of King George VI used in no previous Churchill biography to
depict him more intimately and persuasively than any of its predecessors. The book in no way
conceals Churchill's faults and it allows the reader to appreciate his virtues and character in
full: his titanic capacity for work (and drink) his ability see the big picture his
willingness to take risks and insistence on being where the action was his good humour even in
the most desperate circumstances the breadth and strength of his friendships and his
extraordinary propensity to burst into tears at unexpected moments. Above all it shows us the
wellsprings of his personality - his lifelong desire to please his father (even long after his
father's death) but aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost everyone else his love of
the British Empire his sense of history and its connection to the present. During the Second
World War Churchill summoned a particular scientist to see him several times for technical
advice. 'It was the same whenever we met' wrote the young man '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 partner in strategy and most severe critic in private 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.'
