From our foremost historian of World War II, a vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime.

A vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime from acclaimed historian Max Hastings, Winston’s War captures the full range of Churchill’s endlessly fascinating character. At once brilliant and infuriating, self-important and courageous, Hastings’s Churchill comes brashly to life as never before.

Beginning in 1940, when popular demand elevated Churchill to the role of prime minister, and concluding with the end of the war, Hastings shows us Churchill at his most intrepid and essential, when, by sheer force of will, he kept Britain from collapsing in the face of what looked like certain defeat. Later, we see his significance ebb as the United States enters the war and the Soviets turn the tide on the Eastern Front. But Churchill, Hastings reminds us, knew as well as anyone that the war would be dominated by others, and he managed his relationships with the other Allied leaders strategically, so as to maintain Britain’s influence and limit Stalin’s gains.

At the same time, Churchill faced political peril at home, a situation for which he himself was largely to blame. Hastings shows how Churchill nearly squandered the miraculous escape of the British troops at Dunkirk and failed to address fundamental flaws in the British Army. His tactical inaptitude and departmental meddling won him few friends in the military, and by 1942, many were calling for him to cede operational control. Nevertheless, Churchill managed to exude a public confidence that brought the nation through the bitter war.

Hastings rejects the traditional Churchill hagiography while still managing to capture what he calls Churchill’s “appetite for the fray.” Certain to be a classic, Winston’s War is a riveting profile of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century.

Excerpt

Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL (born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. He is the son of Macdonald Hastings, the noted British journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar. Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year. He became a foreign correspondent and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC television and for the Evening Standard in London. Hastings was the first journalist to enter the liberated Port Stanley during the Falklands War. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he returned to the Evening Standard as editor in 1996 until his retirement in 2001. He received a knighthood in 2002. He has presented historical documentaries for BBC TV, and is the author of many books, including Bomber Command which earned the Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction in 1980. Both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England from 2002-2007. He currently writes a column for the Daily Mail but often contributes articles to other publications such as The Guardian and The New York Review of Books. In his 2007 book Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (also known as Retribution in the United States), the chapter on Australia's role in the last year of the Pacific War was criticised by the Returned and Services League of Australia and one of the historians at the Australian War Memorial for, in their view, exaggerating discontent in the Australian Army during this period. Hastings lives with his second wife Penny (née Levinson), with whom he had two children, in west Berkshire. In 1999, his 27-year-old son Charles killed himself in Shanghai, China. Hastings dedicated his book Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 to his late son.

Would you like to read this book? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.