Andrew Roberts' Churchill: A Journey Through Destiny

J. Speakman: Andrew Roberts has, in my opinion, written a magnificent biography of Churchill. Beautifully written and expertly researched. It covers all aspects of Churchill's personal and public life and times. It's the only biography that gets to the heart of his character - virtues and failings - and what drove him to succeed. I laughed and cried in equal measure. This should be on the school curriculum!

United Kingdom on Sep 01, 2023

Fernando Jose de Morais: Bom

Brazil on Sep 01, 2023

GT-ONE: A good weighty book and a good weighty read. Interesting and well written. An interesting insight into one of history's most important (if controversial) figures.

United Kingdom on Sep 01, 2023

Billatwa: Looking back on Churchill with added information from the royal archives gives a more complete picture of the man. That he had faults was not unexpected even if some were quite surprising. The relationship between wartime Britain and the Americans was also interesting. American support came with, almost, pound of flesh conditions and only the Japanese brought America into the war with real support for Britain. On this and much more a very interesting read.

Australia on Jun 24, 2023

John Ryder: Being German I have so far only read a lot of the well known quotes here and there which sparked my interest to find out more about the man behind them.
I ordered this book via Amazon and was initially flattened by the shere volume of 982 pages in small print plus the pages with annotations.
Often these books make you tired or eventually give up. Not so with this one. I found each and every page interesting and well told and never got tired of it at all. In fact I found out a lot of new things I did not know about apart from Churchill.
I also like the fact that the author portraits WC in detail but leaves his own resume and comments until the last chapter. This gives the book a neutral perspective.
All in all, if you want to know the subject, this is a perfect book.
I don't regret buying or reading it at all.

Germany on Jun 23, 2023

Michael Herzen: A good biography should include photos, maps, footnotes (to verify citations), bibliography, and detailed index. On those criteria, this is a superlative biography, with all of those in abundance. The author, training and residing (mostly) in England, has adapted some Anglicisms for this American audience, but be prepared to navigate from time to time the intricacies of elections to the House of Commons, which are not.
Although one volume, this paperback edition is massive, with almost 1000 pages of text alone, plus an additional nearly 40 pages of footnotes (not to mention a ‘select bibliography’ and detailed index). For such a man, who published 37 volumes of prose, mostly history, of over 6 million words (pp 972-3), in addition to his life-long commitment to politics, this hefty work of small print is barely enough to encompass the minimum needed to paint his greatness, without omitting his exasperating deficiencies – this is, to reemphasize, a biography, and not a whitewash. The author’s task, of reading all this and much more (including, especially, his letters to his wife Clementine, Soviet Ambassador Maisky’s musings, Brooke’s frustrations in his diary...

United States on Mar 10, 2021

John Walker: At the point that Andrew Roberts sat down to write a new biography of Winston Churchill, there were a total of 1009 biographies of the man in print, examining every aspect of his life from a multitude of viewpoints. Works include the encyclopedic three-volume  The Last Lion  by William Manchester and Paul Reid, and Roy Jenkins' single-volume  Churchill: A Biography , which concentrates on Churchill's political career. Such books may seem to many readers to say just about everything about Churchill there is to be said from the abundant documentation available for his life. What could a new biography possibly add to the story?

As the author demonstrates in this magnificent and weighty book (1152 pages, 982 of main text), a great deal. Earlier Churchill biographers laboured under the constraint that many of Churchill's papers from World War II and the postwar era remained under the seal of official secrecy. These included the extensive notes taken by King George VI during his weekly meetings with the Prime Minister during the war and recorded in his personal diary. The classified documents were made public only fifty years after the end of the war, and the...

United States on Jul 19, 2019