The second volume of the Nobel Prize-winning Prime Minister’s biography of his father, the controversial Victorian era British MP.
In 1906, Sir Winston Churchill produced a two-volume biography of his father Lord Randolph Churchill, the 19th century Member of Parliament whose political career ended in scandal. This second volume detail’s the elder Churchill’s emergence as an independent leader who challenged the old guard of his own Conservative Party.
As an obscure and overlooked backbench MP, Randolph established a cohort of Tory rebels known as the “fourth party.” Though excluded from British high society, he nevertheless made a name for himself and rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But as he was on course to run for Prime Minister, his confrontational style led to a career-ending blunder.
Sir Winston S. Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." Over a 64-year span, Churchill published over forty books, many multi-volume definitive accounts of historical events to which he was a witness and participant. All are beautifully written and as accessible and relevant today as when first published. During his fifty-year political career, Churchill served twice as Prime Minister in addition to other prominent positions—including President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Home Secretary. In the 1930s, Churchill was one of the first to recognize the danger of the rising Nazi power in Germany and to campaign for rearmament in Britain. His leadership and inspired broadcasts and speeches during World War II helped strengthen British resistance to Adolf Hitler—and played an important part in the Allies’ eventual triumph. One of the most inspiring wartime leaders of modern history, Churchill was also an orator, a historian, a journalist, and an artist. All of these aspects of Churchill are fully represented in this collection of his works.