Essays examine Churchill's family life, foreign policy, social reforms, economic ideas, views on Zionism, and relationship with the monarchy and fellow statesmen.
Gladstone 1875-1898 is the culmination of Colin Matthew's acclaimed study of one of Britain's greatest statesmen. William Ewart Gladstone retired from politics in 1875, but returned for a further twenty years at the forefront of British politics. Gladstone 1809-1874 told the story of Gladstone's first political career; his second is examined in this volume. The book tells the story of Gladstone's last three premierships and his dramatic political campaigns as he pursued his often controversial aims, particularly his mission to bring Home Rule to Ireland. Political reform, Egypt, Gordon in the Sudan, and the 'Scramble for Africa' are other major themes. The treatment of Gladstone's political career is balanced by Colin Matthew's acute discussion of his full and active private life, including his enormous correspondence and prodigiously wide reading. The book ends with a moving account of Gladstone's death and state funeral, the last great set-piece of Victorian Liberalism. Colin Matthew's writings on Gladstone are generally acknowledged to have transformed understanding of the 'Grand Old Man' of British politics and his age. Appearing first as Introductions to his definitive edition of The Gladstone Diaries, they have been revised and made available in this volume and its predecessor.
"When today's world leaders require inspiration and strength in times of crisis, they often invoke Winston Churchill. The son of a member of Parliament, Churchill, a poor academic student, wanted to be a soldier early in life. At this he succeeded brilliantly, fighting fearlessly on the frontiers of the British Empire but eventually being captured. His escape from a South African prison camp led him to national fame and catapulted him into a life of politics.". "In this Penguin Life, the eminent historian John Keegan charts Churchill's career, examining his steadfast leadership as prime minister during the catastrophic events of World War II while England was dangerously poised on the brink of collapse. With wonderful eloquence, Keegan illuminates Churchill's incredible strength during this crucial moment in history and his unshakable belief that democracy would prevail. Keegan looks at Churchill's speeches which are some of the greatest examples of English oratory, and identifies his ability to communicate his own idea of an English past as the source of Churchill's greatness. He also sheds light on the political climate of Churchill's time. The result is an insightful, sensitive portrait of Churchill the war leader and Churchill the man."--BOOK JACKET.
When David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill began their long friendship, one of their numerous enemies nicknamed the new friends "the Heavenly Twins" after a set of gifted, irresponsible, and inseparable twins in a late Victorian novel. In Lloyd George and Churchill: How Friendship Changed Politics, Marvin Rintala explores the lengthy and unexpected friendship between these two statesmen, from its beginning in early 1901 to its end at Lloyd George's death in 1945. Rintala examines the dynamics that shaped the friendship between two powerful men (a friendship that belied Lloyd George's statement that "there are no friends at the top") and the ways in which this friendship shaped British politics during the first half of the twentieth century.
"Macaulay's History of England stands as a classic more than a century after its completion; his parliamentary speeches and his collected Essays inspired generations of British statesmen; English and American schoolboys by the millions memorized and recited his Lays of Ancient Rome. What were the forces--familial, intellectual, circumstantial, and psychological--that shaped the life and mind of the great English historian and orator whose name became a household word on both sides of the Atlantic? In this book, based in large part on manuscript sources hitherto never fully exploited, historian John Clive shows us Macaulay the child, the youth, and the burgeoning historian and statesman--against the background of pre-Victorian England, in which he made his intellectual and political debut.^ With sympathy and skill, the varied threads of Macaulay's formative years are brought to light: his moralistic, Evangelical upbringing in the pietistic atmosphere of the Clapham Sect; his relationship with his stern, dominating father, his gentle, protective mother, and his two youngest sisters, Margaret and Hannah, who alone were to respond to his immense need for warmth and affection; his youthful oratorical and literary successes; his early preoccupation with history as the advance of civilization; his dual role as actor and spectator in the great events of the first Reform Bill battle, as well as in Whig society in London; and, finally, his years as a legal and educational reformer in India. Here is the private man: ungainly, undistinguished-looking, given to self-dramatization and fantasy and torrents of talk; enjoying his role as a social lion, but becoming disillusioned and dissatisfied with his role in politics.^ Determined to be his own man, he had no sooner achieved financial and political security--in a lucrative post on the Governor-General's Council in India--than the relationship with his beloved sisters so necessary to his emotional security was destroyed. Here is the public Macaulay: cocksure and impetuous, a parvenu lacking the specific gravity of a statesman, and yet speaking out not only for freedom as an abstraction, but concretely for the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics and blacks; envisioning a potential beauty and splendor in industrialization; almost singlehandedly writing a penal code for India; becoming embroiled in the crucial controversy over Indian education (what should be taught and in what language); and forever leaving his mark on Anglo-Indian cultural relations--just as India left its mark on him.^ And, finally, here is the Macaulay who returned at the age of 38 to a London in the grip of the impending coronation of Queen Victoria--with the idea of the History of England firmly in his mind. From Clapham, to Cambridge, to the House of Commons, to Calcutta, and back to England, Macaulay is seen not only as a man of extraordinary intellect and vision finding himself but as the product of a family, a class, a time, and a place. The man and his works are made immediate and are fully understood in this superb, full-scale portrait."--Dust jacket.
Churchill by Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis | Literally Just Books
