Churchill: Walking with Destiny

by Andrew Roberts

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

One of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of 2018
One of The Economist’s Best Books of 2018
One of The New York Times’s Notable Books of 2018

“Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” —Wall Street Journal

In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood—by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Last King of America.

When we seek an example of great leaders with unalloyed courage, the person who comes to mind is Winston Churchill: the iconic, visionary war leader immune from the consensus of the day, who stood firmly for his beliefs when everyone doubted him. But how did young Winston become Churchill? What gave him the strength to take on the superior force of Nazi Germany when bombs rained on London and so many others had caved? In Churchill, Andrew Roberts gives readers the full and definitive Winston Churchill, from birth to lasting legacy, as personally revealing as it is compulsively readable.

Roberts gained exclusive access to extensive new material: transcripts of War Cabinet meetings, diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs from Churchill's contemporaries. The Royal Family permitted Roberts—in a first for a Churchill biographer—to read the detailed notes taken by King George VI in his diary after his weekly meetings with Churchill during World War II. This treasure trove of access allows Roberts to understand the man in revelatory new ways, and to identify the hidden forces fueling Churchill's legendary drive.

We think of Churchill as a hero who saved civilization from the evils of Nazism and warned of the grave crimes of Soviet communism, but Roberts's masterwork reveals that he has as much to teach us about the challenges leaders face today—and the fundamental values of courage, tenacity, leadership and moral conviction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101980996
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Pages:	1152
Sales rank:	100,896
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.60(d)

About the Author

Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945, Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble and Napoleon: A Life, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and a finalist for the Plutarch Award. He has won many other prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize and the British Army Military Book of the Year, and frequently writes for The Wall Street Journal. He lives in London and often lectures in New York.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

On Thursday, 20 December 1945, the editor of the Sunday Dispatch, Charles Eade, lunched with Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine at their new home in Knightsbridge in London. Eade was editing the former Prime Minister's wartime speeches for publication, and they were due to discuss the latest volume.

Before lunch, Eade had waited in what he later described as 'a beautiful room with bookshelves let into the wall and carrying superbly bound volumes of French and English books', which Churchill called his 'snob library'. The walls were adorned with pictures of Churchill's great ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, and a portrait of Churchill painted by Sir John Lavery during the First World War.

The lunch reflected post-war British rationing: an egg dish, cold turkey and salad, plum pudding and coffee. They drank a bottle of claret that the Mayor of Bordeaux had just sent over. Churchill told the trusted journalist, who had lunched with him several times during the war, that he 'had got very drunk' at a dinner at the French Embassy the previous night, adding with a chuckle, 'drunker than usual'.

Over several glasses of brandy and a cigar - whose band Eade took away as a souvenir - Churchill got down to discussing the best way to publish the wartime speeches he had delivered when the House of Commons had been in secret session during the war. In the course of their hour-long talk, he showed Eade the sixty-eight volumes of minutes, messages and memoranda that he had sent to various Cabinet ministers and the Chiefs of Staff between 1940 and 1945, allowing him to open them at random.

When Eade naturally expressed surprise at the sheer volume of work that Churchill had managed to get through as prime minister, 'He explained to me that he was able to handle all these affairs at the centre, because his whole life had been a training for the high office he had filled during the war.' It was a sentiment that Churchill had expressed two years earlier to the Canadian Prime Minister, William Mackenzie King, during the Quebec Conference in August 1943. When King told Churchill that no one else could have saved the British Empire in 1940, he replied that 'he had had very exceptional training, having been through a previous war, and having had large experience in government.' King rejoined, 'Yes, it almost confirmed the old Presbyterian idea of pre-destination or pre-ordination; of his having been the man selected for this task.' This idea was reiterated by the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham, who had been a junior minister in Churchill's wartime government, when he said, 'The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill's arrival at the premiership at that precise moment in 1940.'

Churchill put his remarks to King and Eade far more poetically three years later in the final lines of his book The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war memoirs. Recalling the evening of Friday, 10 May 1940, when he had become prime minister only hours after Adolf Hitler had unleashed his Blitzkrieg on the West, Churchill wrote, 'I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial ... I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail.'

He had believed in his own destiny since at least the age of sixteen, when he told a friend that he would save Britain from a foreign invasion. His lifelong admiration of Napoleon and his own ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, coloured his belief that he too was a man of destiny. His aristocratic birth, as the holder of the two famous names of Spencer and Churchill, gave him a tremendous self-confidence that meant that he was not personally hurt by criticism. In the courageous and often lonely stands he was to take against the twin totalitarian threats of Fascism and Communism, he cared far more for what he imagined would have been the good opinion of his fallen comrades of the Great War than for what was said by his living colleagues on the benches of the House of Commons.

The memory of his friends killed in war or by accidents (such as Lawrence of Arabia) or alcoholism (such as F. E. Smith) very often moved Churchill to tears, but so did many other things, as this book will relate. Churchill's passions and emotions often mastered him, and he never minded crying in public, even as prime minister, in an age that admired the stiff upper lip. This was just one phenomenon of many that made him a profoundly unusual person.

This book explores the extraordinary degree to which in 1940 Churchill's past life had indeed been but a preparation for his leadership in the Second World War. It investigates the myriad lessons that he learned in the sixty-five years before he became prime minister - years of error and tragedy as well as of hard work and inspiring leadership - then it looks at the ways that he put those lessons to use during civilization's most testing hour and trial. For although he was indeed walking with destiny in May 1940, it was a destiny that he had consciously spent a lifetime shaping.

Part One

The Preparation

1

A Famous Name, November 1874-January 1895

It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.

Churchill, Marlborough

Half English aristocrat and half American gambler.

Harold Macmillan on Churchill

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born in a small ground-floor room, the nearest bedroom to the main entrance of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, at 1.30 a.m. on Monday, 30 November 1874. It was a worrying birth as the baby was at least six weeks premature, and his mother, the beautiful American socialite Jennie Jerome, had suffered a fall a few days earlier. She had also been shaken by a pony-cart the day before the birth, following which her labour-pains started. In the event there were no abnormalities, and the baby's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was soon describing him as 'wonderfully pretty' with 'dark eyes and hair and very healthy'. (The hair soon went strawberry blond, and great tresses of it from when he was five can be seen in the birth room at the Palace today; thereafter Churchill was red-headed.)

The name 'Winston' recalled both Sir Winston Churchill, the child's ancestor who had fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War, and Lord Randolph's elder brother, who had died aged four. 'Leonard' honoured the baby's maternal grandfather, a risk-taking American financier and railway-owner who had already made and lost two great fortunes on Wall Street. 'Spencer' had been hyphenated with 'Churchill' since 1817, the result of a marital alliance with the rich Spencer family of Althorp, Northamptonshire, who at that time held the earldom of Sunderland and were later to become the Earls Spencer. Proud of his Spencer forebears, he signed himself Winston S. Churchill, and in 1942 told an American trade unionist that 'of course his real name was Spencer-Churchill and it is in this way that he is described, for example, in Court Circulars when he goes to see the King.'

 

The child's paternal grandfather was John Winston Spencer-Churchill, owner of Blenheim Palace, which has been described both as the English Versailles and as 'the greatest war memorial ever built'. Named after the most glorious of the battles won by John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, in the War of Spanish Succession in 1704, its magnificent structure, tapestries, busts, paintings and furnishings commemorated a victory in a conflict that had saved Britain from domination by a European superpower - in this case, the France of Louis XIV - a message that the young Winston did not fail to imbibe. 'We have nothing to equal this,' King George III admitted when he visited Blenheim Palace in 1786.

'We shape our buildings,' Winston Churchill was later to say, 'and afterwards our buildings shape us.' Although he never lived at Blenheim, he was profoundly influenced by the splendour of the Palace's 500-foot frontage, its 7 acres of rooms and its 2,700-acre estate. He absorbed its magnificence during the many holidays and weekends he stayed there with his cousins. The Palace was - still is - pervaded with the spirit of the 1st Duke, the greatest soldier-statesman in British history, who, as Churchill was to describe him in his biography of his ancestor, was a duke 'in days when dukes were dukes'.

For his late Victorian contemporaries, the young Winston Churchill's name conjured up two images: the splendour of the 1st Duke's military reputation and Palace of course, but also the adventurous career of Lord Randolph Churchill, the child's father. Lord Randolph had been elected a Member of Parliament nine months before Churchill was born, and was one of the leaders of the Conservative Party from the child's sixth birthday onwards. He was controversial, mercurial, opportunistic, politically ruthless, a brilliant speaker both on public platforms and in the House of Commons, and was marked out as a future prime minister - as long as his inherent tendency to recklessness did not get the better of him. In politics, he followed the precepts of the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, which combined imperialism abroad with a progressive programme of social reform at home. Lord Randolph was to call his version Tory Democracy, and it was to be imbibed in full by Winston. His slogan, 'Trust the People', was to be used many times in his son's career.

Although Lord Randolph was the son of a duke, he was not rich, at least relative to most of the rest of his class. As an aristocratic younger son in the era of primogeniture, he could not expect to inherit much from his father; and although the father of his American wife Jennie Jerome had been enormously rich in the recent past - he was once nicknamed 'the King of New York' - he had seen massive reverses in the American stock-market crash of 1873. Nevertheless, Leonard Jerome still lived in a house that covered an entire block on Madison Avenue and 26th Street, and which boasted extensive stabling and a full-size theatre. He had owned the land where the Jerome Park Reservoir is today, founded the American Jockey Club and co-owned the New York Times.

By the time of Jennie's wedding the year after the crash, however, Jerome could settle only £2,000 per annum on his beautiful daughter, the Duke of Marlborough contributing £1,200 per annum for his son. Along with the leasehold on a house at 48 Charles Street in Mayfair, courtesy of Jerome, that ought to have been enough for the couple to live upon comfortably, had they not both been notorious spendthrifts. 'We were not rich,' their son recalled during the Second World War. 'I suppose we had about three thousand pounds a year and spent six thousand.'

Lord Randolph had met Jennie at Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight in August 1873. After only three days he had proposed and been accepted. They married in the British Embassy in Paris after a seven-month engagement, on 15 April 1874. Although the Marlboroughs gave their formal blessing to the union, they were absent from the wedding, because the Duke - who had sent agents to New York and Washington to try to ascertain Jerome's genuine net worth - thought it a mŽsalliance and Jerome 'a vulgar kind of man', 'a bad character' from 'the class of speculators'.

Churchill was proud that his parents had married for love. Writing in 1937 about a libel action he was launching against a book which had described him as 'the first-fruit of the first famous snob-dollar marriage', he told a friend:

The reference to my mother and father's marriage is not only very painful to me, but as you know is utterly devoid of foundation. This was a love-match if ever there was one, with very little money on either side. In fact they could only live in the very smallest way possible to people in London Society. If the marriage became famous afterwards it was because my father, an unknown sprig of the aristocracy, became famous, and also because my mother, as all her photographs attest, was by general consent one of the beauties of her time.

(He eventually won £500 in damages from the publisher for the libel, plus £250 in costs, but not the apology for which he had been hoping.)

Winston Churchill was born into a caste that held immense political and economic power in the largest empire in world history, and that had not yet become plagued by insecurity and self-doubt. Churchill's sublime self-confidence and self-reliance stemmed directly from the assurance he instinctively felt in who he was and where he came from. In his obituary of his cousin 'Sunny', the 9th Duke of Marlborough, he wrote that he had been born into one of 'the three or four hundred families which had for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation'. He knew he came from the apex of the social pyramid, and one of the key attributes of that class at that time was not to care overmuch what people further down it thought of them. As his greatest friend, the Tory MP and barrister F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, was to write of him, 'He was shielded in his own mind from self-distrust.' This was to prove invaluable to Churchill at the periods - of which there were many - when no one else seemed to trust him.

The social life of the Victorian and Edwardian upper classes was partly based upon staying in the country houses of friends and acquaintances for the 'Friday-to-Monday' extended weekend. Over the coming years, Churchill was to stay with the Lyttons at Knebworth, his cousins the Londonderrys at Mount Stewart, the Rothschilds at Tring, the Grenfells at Taplow and Panshanger, the Roseberys at Dalmeny, the Cecils at Hatfield, the Duke of Westminster at Eaton Hall and on his yacht Flying Cloud, his cousins Lord and Lady Wimborne at Canford Manor, the John Astors at Hever and the Waldorf Astors at Cliveden, as well as paying frequent visits to Blenheim and very many other such houses. Although he occasionally experienced social ostracism as a result of his politics in later life, he always had an extensive and immensely grand social network upon which he could fall back. This largely aristocratic cocoon of friendship and kinship was to sustain him in the bad times to come.

Editorial Reviews

Roberts tells this story with great authority and not a little panache. He writes elegantly, with enjoyable flashes of tartness, and is in complete command both of his sources and the vast historiography. For a book of a thousand pages, there are surprisingly no longueurs. Roberts is admiring of Churchill, but not uncritically so. Often he lays out the various debates before the reader so that we can draw different conclusions to his own…Some may find Roberts's emphasis on politics and war old-fashioned…But it would be foolish to say Roberts made the wrong choice. He is Thucydidean in viewing decisions about war and politics, politics and war as the crux of the matter. A life defined by politics here rightly gets a political life. All told, it must surely be the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written.

The New York Times Book Review - Richard Aldous

★ 09/24/2018
Roberts (Napoleon: A Life) serves up an extraordinary biography of Winston Churchill. A resolutely pro-British empire “child of the Victorian era” who was emotionally neglected by his aristocratic father and frivolous American-raised mother, Churchill by his 20s had already reported from, fought in, and sometimes written books about imperial struggles in such places as Cuba, Sudan, India, and South Africa. He leveraged fame due to an escape from Boer captivity to win an election to British parliament in 1900 at age 25. As first lord of the admiralty during WWI, he was scapegoated for the military fiasco of Gallipoli in 1915 and cast into the political wilderness, which strengthened his nonconformist, independent nature, Roberts writes, helping him when he became prime minister in 1940. Roberts captures Churchill’s close working relationship with FDR (“the greatest American friend we have ever known”), his distrust of his chiefs of staff, and his excessive faith in Stalin’s promises in 1945. He also captures the man, dispelling the myth that Churchill was prone to depression and revealing his deep love for his wife, Clementine; his egotism, his wit, his loyalty to friends, his penchant sometimes for “selfishness, insensitivity, and ruthlessness”; and his “sybaritic” love of good drink and cigars. This biography is exhaustively researched, beautifully written and paced, deeply admiring but not hagiographic, and empathic and balanced in its judgments—a magnificent achievement. Agent: Georgina Capel, Georgina Capel Assoc. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2018-09-12

Sprawling life of the great British leader, drawing on previously unavailable documents, including notes of wartime counsels kept by King George VI.

No stranger to big biographies or larger-than-life subjects, historian and commentator Roberts (Napoleon: A Life, 2014, etc.) faces a special challenge with Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who closely documented himself and still has managed to inspire a roomful of books. Roberts adds materially to the library by consulting troves of documents unknown or not open to other researchers. He also has a sense of both drama and character as well as the context of Churchill's time. As the author writes early on, Churchill "was born into a caste that held immense political and economic power in the largest empire in world history, and that had not yet become plagued by insecurity and self-doubt." Sometimes Churchill's overconfidence led to disaster, as at Gallipoli; other times it helped his nation steel itself for war, as with his "fight them on the beaches" speech at the dawn of World War II. Roberts turns up fascinating fragments, including solid evidence that Churchill was not always the pro-American some biographers have claimed him to be: "You have to try and understand and master America and make her like you," counseled his wife, Clementine. Better still, the narrative underscores Churchill's attention to the smallest details while seeing the big picture of global strategy in matters such as handling an always-fraught alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler and laying the groundwork for a postwar world with plenty of tensions of its own, including the question of a Jewish state in Palestine. Roberts' portrait comes warts and all, allowing, for instance, that the leader who decried Nazi air attacks on London would order the leveling by bombing of whole German cities. The author delivers a clear, well-limned view of a complex figure who, in no danger of being forgotten, continues to inspire.

The most comprehensive single-volume biography of Churchill that we have in print and a boon for any student of the statesman and his times.

Kirkus Reviews

A USA Today Book You Won't Want to Miss
A Washington Post Book to Read in November
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of November
A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018
An Octavian Report Essential Read for 2019
A New York Post Book That Should Be On Everyone's Holiday Gift List 
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018
A Lit Hub Best Book of 2018
Shortlisted for the 2019 Plutarch Award

"The best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written. . . . Roberts tells this story with great authority and not a little panache. He writes elegantly, with enjoyable flashes of tartness, and is in complete command both of his sources and the vast historiography."
—Richard Aldous, The New York Times 

"Terrific . . . By drawing on many previously untapped sources, Mr. Roberts has produced a more complete picture of his subject than any previous biography."
—The Economist

"Even if you’ve read every other book about the former prime minister and seen all the movies, expect revelations. For example: The royal family permitted the author to read King George VI’s diary notes about his wartime meetings with Churchill. That’s a first."
—The Washington Post 

"Brilliant, breathtaking, unputdownable . . . the definitive picture of our greatest political leader. All Roberts's past life has been but a preparation for this hour and this work, and this brilliant book is a fitting crown to his own career."
—London Evening Standard

"Roberts’ new biography (★★★★ out of four) stands tall, re-illuminating the well-etched contours of Churchill’s monumental life with scrupulous scholarship and a flair for unearthing the telling detail; looking twice where most biographers have been content to glance once."
—USA Today 

"In this season of giving, get (and give) Andrew Roberts’s brilliant new biography. . . . A review last month in The Times called it 'the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written,' but it’s more than that. It’s an antidote to the reigning conceits, self-deceptions, half-truths and clichés of our day."
—Bret Stephens, The New York Times

"The best biography of Winston ever written . . . bursts with character, humour and incident on almost every page."
—The Sunday Times 

“At a time when every fraud and charlatan is taking refuge in spurious fantasies of Churchilliana, it is salutary to read this brilliant, bracing mega-biography of Winston Churchill and be reminded what Britain’s most famous prime minister was actually like.”
—The Guardian

"Fantastically readable prose, which flows along in a pitch-perfect combination of erudition and eloquence . . . In brightly engaging chapters, Roberts takes readers through all the stages of Churchill's adventurous life as a soldier of the empire and then as a professional politician . . . Roberts is a shrewd and experienced biographer."
—Christian Science Monitor

"A tour de force of scrupulous selection and astute appraisal, perhaps the best full-scale biography to date in a field where the competition has been crowded and stiff."
—National Review

"A stupendous achievement: lucid, erudite, intelligent, but also inspiring. Roberts catches the imperishable grandeur of Churchill's life as no other historian has done. Roberts does full justice to Churchill’s superhuman range of activity."
—Standpoint Magazine

"The best single-volume life imaginable of a man whose life it would seem technically impossible to get into a single volume."
—Daily Telegraph

"Roberts brilliantly conjures up one of the most fascinating characters of all time. He enriches the saga with wonderful examples of Churchill's aristocratic eccentricities, glittering oratory and wit."
—Literary Review

"It’s the sort of biography that, one feels, Churchill himself would have wanted: colossal, energetic, deeply knowledgeable, properly critical, but also sympathetic and, in places, deliciously funny."
—Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

"Roberts is a master storyteller."
—The Weekly Standard

"[Roberts's] research is outstanding, based on archival and primary sources . . . What emerges in Roberts' book is a man full of complexities. . . . Roberts' book is full of insights and facts that provide a deeper understanding of Churchill."
—Tom Hallman, Jr., The Oregonian

"This definitive biography of the storied leader was made possible through unprecedented access to material, including diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs and even the detailed diary notes taken by King George VI."
—New York Post

"Terrific . . . Churchill probably lived the most variegated life of any political figure of the 20th century. Moreover, he was obnoxious, charming, emotional, selfish and patriotic. Roberts has captured his complexity in a way that few historians have ever imagined."
—The Boston Herald

"Roberts’s brilliant new book is not only learned and sagacious but also thrilling and fun. An award-winning historian and biographer, an expert on statecraft, leadership, and the Second World War, Roberts writes with authority and confidence. Enriched by such previously unseen material as King George VI’s wartime diaries, [Churchill] should stand as the definitive one-volume Churchill biography." 
—The City Journal

"Andrew Roberts has written the best single-volume biography of Winston Churchill to date."
—New York Journal of Books

"Widely praised as the best single-volume biography of Winston Churchill ever written, historian and commentator Roberts draws on previously unavailable journals and notes for the robust, engrossing, and nuanced history of the great British leader."
—The National Book Review

"Roberts writes gripping narrative history without deserting high scholarly standards. . . . Surely the last word for years to come on Churchill."
—History Today

"Like all of Andrew Roberts’s histories, Churchill is massively researched and exquisitely written. The author’s sharp sense of humor is often in evidence and warmly complements Churchill’s own. This is a brilliant work, by a very fine historian, on a permanently heroic and always fascinating figure."
—The New Criterion

"Wonderful, masterly . . . There have been few lives as long, momentous, and wide-ranging as that of Sir Winston Churchill, author, adventurer, orator, wit, painter, animal lover, friend, and politician. Andrew Roberts’s masterful, supremely readable biography has a text 982 pages long. It could hardly have been shorter and told so extraordinary a story so well."
—Commentary

"The most superb one-volume biography I have ever read—of anyone. . . . Roberts also manages something I thought impossible. He has given us a new, ground-breaking portrait of the man whom many consider to be the greatest ever Englishman. . . . Roberts’s brilliance as a biographer was clear from his very first, of Lord Halifax. Re-reading it in tandem with this magnificent Churchill, one sees yet again just how finely history turns on random and uncertain events. . . . This is a simply wonderful book. A living, poetic, stirring yet thought-provoking portrait of a giant, it will be regarded as a classic for generations to come."
—The Jewish Chronicle

"Terrific. . . . [Roberts] is one of the great historians of his generation and he is stupendously readable. . . . Andrew Roberts has captured [Churchill’s] complexity in a way that few historians have ever imagined."
—The American Spectator

“Not only is it the best biography I have read this year; it might well be the best I’ve read ever. In terms of Roberts’s oeuvre, this book will surely stand as his masterpiece. This is biography as art, and a finer example one could scarcely hope to read. Why on earth does the world need another biography of Churchill? Before reading this, it would have been hard to say. Afterwards, very easy indeed—because it needed Andrew Roberts to write it.”
—The Catholic Herald

“Winston Churchill was perhaps the greatest leader of the twentieth century and a person who never ceases to fascinate and inspire. Widely hailed as the best single volume biography of Churchill ever written, historian Roberts’ magisterial biography captures the unfailing spirit of the man who saved Europe in all his flawed brilliance.”
—The Octavian Report

"In my opinion, the book, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, is the most precious gift of the year 2018—in history, education, knowledge, and literature. . . . If there were a Nobel Prize for historical research, Andrew Roberts would be a perfect candidate."
—The Jerusalem Report

"A page-turner . . . full of new material that has not been previously available to Churchill scholars. Roberts manages to mobilize these tremendous sources into a well-paced narrative that is full of exciting passages—which matches  perfectly the venturesome spirit of Winston Churchill."
—Law & Liberty

"A complex and compelling depiction of one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century, one sure to enlighten and provoke both those familiar with Churchill and those who may know little beyond . . . a tour de force. Roberts has given us a great gift. He presents a Churchill in all of his complexity. What makes this book essential for those who care about reviving and defending liberal democracy in our time is that it reminds us that, even at moments when old hatreds burn bright and few are willing to swim against the current, it is still possible for great leaders to emerge."
—American Interest

"I didn’t think we really needed a new Churchill biography, or, having read so many, that I would find a new one catching up my attention, but Roberts proved me wrong. In addition to new source material, Roberts’s judgments about Churchill, and his keen selection of the most salient details about Churchill thought and action, are superb."
—Claremont Review of Books 

"A magnificent and carefully nuanced life and times of Winston Churchill, elegantly written, studded with new research, and deeply imagined. Andrew Roberts accomplishes a minor miracle in offering a fresh, empathetic portrait in an authoritative and fast-paced narrative that never flags. Roberts explores Winston Churchill’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader, his self-centeredness and his generosity, allowing us to feel both Churchill’s personal vulnerabilities as well as his force as a public figure."
—Biographers International Organization

"A heroic biography, appropriately matched to the ambition, egotism, and undoubted achievement of the life it describes. It will surely remain the outstanding Churchill biography for many years to come."
—International Churchill Society

"The newly definitive one-volume biography of its subject . . . Andrew Roberts has brilliantly reconstructed the life of a titanic figure of the twentieth century within the intellectual context of his times. As such, Churchill constitutes a first-rate, authentic work of historical scholarship for our time."
—History News Network

"Riveting . . . A masterful biography, rich in detail and insight."
—Booklist (starred review)

"A well-researched and exceptionally well-written biography . . . This compelling book is likely to become a standard text on Churchill and will be difficult to keep on the shelves."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"This biography is exhaustively researched, beautifully written and paced, deeply admiring but not hagiographic, and empathic and balanced in its judgments—a magnificent achievement."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A clear, well-limned view of a complex figure who, in no danger of being forgotten, continues to inspire. The most comprehensive single-volume biography of Churchill that we have in print and a boon for any student of the statesman and his times."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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