A new biography of Winston Churchill, revealing how his relationships with the other great figures of his age shaped his own triumphs and failures as a leader
Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. In Mirrors of Greatness, prizewinning historian David Reynolds reevaluates Churchill’s life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill’s lifelong struggle to overcome his political failures and his evolving grasp of what “greatness” truly entailed.
Through his dealings with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, we follow Churchill’s triumphant campaign against Nazi Germany. But we also see a Churchill whose misjudgments of allies and rivals like Roosevelt, Stalin, Gandhi, and Clement Attlee blinded him to the British Empire’s waning dominance on the world stage and to the rising popularity of a postimperial, socialist vision of Great Britain at home.
Magisterial and incisive, Mirrors of Greatness affords Churchill his due as a figure of world-historical importance and deepens our understanding of his legend by uncovering the ways his greatest contemporaries helped make him the man he was, for good and for ill.
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David Reynolds is a professor of international history and a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. He was awarded a scholarship to study at Dulwich College, then Cambridge and Harvard universities. He received the Wolfson History Prize in 2004 and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005. He teaches and lectures at Cambridge University, specializing in the two world wars and the Cold War. Since October 2013 he has been chairman of the history faculty at Cambridge. He is the author of ten books, including several on modern America and its relations with Europe. In addition to his teaching and writing, he has made nine documentaries on twentieth-century history for the BBC, including the award-winning radio drama America, Empire of Liberty.