Winston Churchill's World View

Winston Churchill's World View PDF Author: Kenneth W. Thompson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807114193
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Kenneth W. Thompson was director emeritus of the White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs and J. Wilson Newman Professor Emeritus of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. He was the author of many books on international relations, including Fathers of International Thought: The Legacy of Political Theory." data-formswitch="ShowAlways" data-fwclientid="30776a15-ecfd-46d9-a98b-ca5902afcc1a" data-fwfieldtype="CopyText" data-fwsubid="70017079" data-hasoriginalvalue="1" data-ignoredatalock="0" data-localstate="Default" data-preservehtmlbullets="0" data-readonly="0" data-takefocus="False" id="EditionBiography" name="EditionBiography" spellcheck="false" contenteditable="false"> Winston Churchill’s place in modern history is assured. As a statesman and world leader, he towers above his contemporaries. As a historian, his reputation is equally secure. But little attention has been given to Churchill’s stature as a political theorist, to the ideas and principles that he developed, tested, and followed throughout his long career as a soldier, military correspondent, politician, world leader, and author. Winston Churchill’s World View is a study of the underlying principles and goals that shaped the actions of one of the most influential men of our time. Kenneth Thompson traces the genesis and elaboration of Churchill’s views from his youth at the fringes of the British Empire through his rise as a politician, his years of determined struggle and final triumph as the prime minister of England in its darkest hour, and the time of reflection that followed his departure from his active political life. Thompson works closely with Churchill’s writing to identify and assess his concepts of power, authority, politics, and diplomacy, as well as his thoughts on international organization and law, collective security, and practical morality. Churchill firmed believed that an effective foreign policy must be based on a set of well-defined but flexible organizing principles. “Those who are possessed of a definite body of doctrine and of deeply rooted convictions,” he wrote in the first volume of his history of World War II, “will be in a much better position to deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairs.” It was the lack of such a set of principle, Churchill contended, that led the Allies into the conflagration of World War II and that in the postwar era threatened to bring about an even more destructive conflict between the West and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s own plan to avert that peril, Thompson shows, was based on the twin pillars of diplomacy and strength. He insisted that peace must be negotiated. But only could a lasting settlement be concluded, a settlement that was not based on weakness and fear. Churchill’s political philosophy was rooted in his own experience and in an awareness of the course of man’s history. It is a perspective at odds with prevailing viewpoints—based not in history, but in a shifting tide of facts and statistics—and with the current perception of a world with problems too complex and numerous to be solved through the simple application of doctrine and conviction. But this complex age, Thompson argues, is one sorely in need of the lessons of history and the wisdom of experienced statesmen. With this study, Thompson demonstrates the relevance of Winston Churchill’s views to the present world situation, and shows the current need for a steady, principled, pragmatic approach to maintaining world peace.

Winston Churchill's World View

Winston Churchill's World View PDF Author: Kenneth W. Thompson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807114193
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Kenneth W. Thompson was director emeritus of the White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs and J. Wilson Newman Professor Emeritus of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. He was the author of many books on international relations, including Fathers of International Thought: The Legacy of Political Theory." data-formswitch="ShowAlways" data-fwclientid="30776a15-ecfd-46d9-a98b-ca5902afcc1a" data-fwfieldtype="CopyText" data-fwsubid="70017079" data-hasoriginalvalue="1" data-ignoredatalock="0" data-localstate="Default" data-preservehtmlbullets="0" data-readonly="0" data-takefocus="False" id="EditionBiography" name="EditionBiography" spellcheck="false" contenteditable="false"> Winston Churchill’s place in modern history is assured. As a statesman and world leader, he towers above his contemporaries. As a historian, his reputation is equally secure. But little attention has been given to Churchill’s stature as a political theorist, to the ideas and principles that he developed, tested, and followed throughout his long career as a soldier, military correspondent, politician, world leader, and author. Winston Churchill’s World View is a study of the underlying principles and goals that shaped the actions of one of the most influential men of our time. Kenneth Thompson traces the genesis and elaboration of Churchill’s views from his youth at the fringes of the British Empire through his rise as a politician, his years of determined struggle and final triumph as the prime minister of England in its darkest hour, and the time of reflection that followed his departure from his active political life. Thompson works closely with Churchill’s writing to identify and assess his concepts of power, authority, politics, and diplomacy, as well as his thoughts on international organization and law, collective security, and practical morality. Churchill firmed believed that an effective foreign policy must be based on a set of well-defined but flexible organizing principles. “Those who are possessed of a definite body of doctrine and of deeply rooted convictions,” he wrote in the first volume of his history of World War II, “will be in a much better position to deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairs.” It was the lack of such a set of principle, Churchill contended, that led the Allies into the conflagration of World War II and that in the postwar era threatened to bring about an even more destructive conflict between the West and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s own plan to avert that peril, Thompson shows, was based on the twin pillars of diplomacy and strength. He insisted that peace must be negotiated. But only could a lasting settlement be concluded, a settlement that was not based on weakness and fear. Churchill’s political philosophy was rooted in his own experience and in an awareness of the course of man’s history. It is a perspective at odds with prevailing viewpoints—based not in history, but in a shifting tide of facts and statistics—and with the current perception of a world with problems too complex and numerous to be solved through the simple application of doctrine and conviction. But this complex age, Thompson argues, is one sorely in need of the lessons of history and the wisdom of experienced statesmen. With this study, Thompson demonstrates the relevance of Winston Churchill’s views to the present world situation, and shows the current need for a steady, principled, pragmatic approach to maintaining world peace.

How Churchill Waged War

How Churchill Waged War PDF Author: Allen Packwood
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 1473893917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
An analytical investigation into Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s decision-making process during every stage of World War II. When Winston Churchill accepted the position of Prime Minister in May 1940, he insisted in also becoming Minister of Defence. This, though, meant that he alone would be responsible for the success or failure of Britain’s war effort. It also meant that he would be faced with many monumental challenges and utterly crucial decisions upon which the fate of Britain and the free world rested. With the limited resources available to the UK, Churchill had to pinpoint where his country’s priorities lay. He had to respond to the collapse of France, decide if Britain should adopt a defensive or offensive strategy, choose if Egypt and the war in North Africa should take precedence over Singapore and the UK’s empire in the East, determine how much support to give the Soviet Union, and how much power to give the United States in controlling the direction of the war. In this insightful investigation into Churchill’s conduct during the Second World War, Allen Packwood, BA, MPhil (Cantab), FRHistS, the Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, enables the reader to share the agonies and uncertainties faced by Churchill at each crucial stage of the war. How Churchill responded to each challenge is analyzed in great detail and the conclusions Packwood draws are as uncompromising as those made by Britain’s wartime leader as he negotiated his country through its darkest days.

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

Churchill, Hitler, and Author: Patrick J. Buchanan
Publisher: Forum Books
ISBN: 0307405168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen– Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations. Among the British and Churchillian errors were: • The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France • The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler • Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest • The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

Churchill's Legacy

Churchill's Legacy PDF Author: Alan Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408880237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Churchill's Legacy describes how Churchill wielded his influence in post-war politics to enable the restoration of Europe through two key speeches in 1946. Having first helped bring victory to the Allies in 1945, Churchill went on to preserve the freedom of the world by gaining the support of the United States in the restoration of Europe. In Fulton Missouri, Churchill alerted America to the reality of 'Uncle Joe' - a tyrant determined to dominate Europe at any cost. Churchill called for an Anglo-American alliance based on their shared values and the deterrent of America's possession of the atomic bomb. Churchill also urged the Americans to recognise the debt they owed Britain for opposing Hitler in 1940. In doing so, he contributed to the US thinking behind the need for the Marshall Plan. In Zurich, Churchill boldly proposed a partnership between France and Germany: a United States of Europe. The hatred stirred up by the war had to be replaced by partnership for Europe to recover its economic vitality and regain its moral stature. Together, the Anglo-American Alliance and a United States of Europe led by France and Germany would have the power to 'smite the crocodile' of Soviet ambition. To understand what Churchill intended with these two speeches requires perspective. The daring of his imagination and the scale of his architecture for a new Western Alliance was extraordinary. At the time, not many recognized the symmetry of what was proposed. At Churchill's funeral in 1965, commentators bemoaned the end of an era. In truth, Churchill was the catalyst of a new era-one built upon effective defence, economic revival, and European unity. His speeches have been added to UNESCO'S International Memory of the World Register.

Insurgent Empire

Insurgent Empire PDF Author: Priyamvada Gopal
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178478415X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.

Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill

Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill PDF Author: Gretchen Rubin
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588363848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Warrior and writer, genius and crank, rider in the British cavalry’s last great charge and inventor of the tank—Winston Churchill led Britain to fight alone against Nazi Germany in the fateful year of 1940 and set the standard for leading a democracy at war. Like no other portrait of its famous subject, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is a dazzling display of facts more improbable than fiction, and an investigation of the contradictions and complexities that haunt biography. Gretchen Craft Rubin gives readers, in a single volume, the kind of rounded view usually gained only by reading dozens of conventional biographies. With penetrating insight and vivid anecdotes, Rubin makes Churchill accessible and meaningful to twenty-first-century readers with forty contrasting views of the man: he was an alcoholic, he was not; he was an anachronism, he was a visionary; he was a racist, he was a humanitarian; he was the most quotable man in the history of the English language, he was a bore. In crisp, energetic language, Rubin creates a new form for presenting a great figure of history—and brings to full realization the depiction of a man too fabulous for any novelist to construct, too complicated for even the longest narrative to describe, and too valuable ever to be forgotten.

Churchill

Churchill PDF Author: Andrew Roberts
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1101981008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of 2018 One of The Economist’s Best Books of 2018 One of The New York Times’s Notable Books of 2018 “Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” —Wall Street Journal In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood--by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Last King of America. When we seek an example of great leaders with unalloyed courage, the person who comes to mind is Winston Churchill: the iconic, visionary war leader immune from the consensus of the day, who stood firmly for his beliefs when everyone doubted him. But how did young Winston become Churchill? What gave him the strength to take on the superior force of Nazi Germany when bombs rained on London and so many others had caved? In Churchill, Andrew Roberts gives readers the full and definitive Winston Churchill, from birth to lasting legacy, as personally revealing as it is compulsively readable. Roberts gained exclusive access to extensive new material: transcripts of War Cabinet meetings, diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs from Churchill's contemporaries. The Royal Family permitted Roberts--in a first for a Churchill biographer--to read the detailed notes taken by King George VI in his diary after his weekly meetings with Churchill during World War II. This treasure trove of access allows Roberts to understand the man in revelatory new ways, and to identify the hidden forces fueling Churchill's legendary drive. We think of Churchill as a hero who saved civilization from the evils of Nazism and warned of the grave crimes of Soviet communism, but Roberts's masterwork reveals that he has as much to teach us about the challenges leaders face today--and the fundamental values of courage, tenacity, leadership and moral conviction.

Churchill and Orwell

Churchill and Orwell PDF Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110888
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller! A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike. Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's—Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. In a crucial moment, they responded first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscations, and then they acted on their beliefs. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the West's compass set toward freedom as its due north. It's not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930's, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini "men we could do business with," if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom—that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted. In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their age's necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940's to triumph over freedom's enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwell's reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Ricks's masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin. Churchill and Orwell is a perfect gift for the holidays!

No More Champagne

No More Champagne PDF Author: David Lough
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250071275
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Meticulously researched by a senior private banker now turned historian, No More Champagne reveals for the first time the full extent of the iconic British war leader's private struggle to maintain a way of life instilled by his upbringing and expected of his public position. Lough uses Churchill's own most private records, many never researched before, to chronicle his family's chronic shortage of money, his own extravagance and his recurring losses from gambling or trading in shares and currencies. Churchill tried to keep himself afloat by borrowing to the hilt, putting off bills and writing 'all over the place'; when all else failed, he had to ask family or friends to come to the rescue. Yet within five years he had taken advantage of his worldwide celebrity to transform his private fortunes with the same ruthlessness as he waged war, reaching 1945 with today's equivalent of £3 million in the bank. His lucrative war memoirs were still to come. Throughout the story, Lough highlights the threads of risk, energy, persuasion, and sheer willpower to survive that link Churchill's private and public lives. He shows how constant money pressures often tempted him to short-circuit the ethical standards expected of public figures in his day before usually pulling back to put duty first-except where the taxman was involved.

Winston Churchill and the Art of Leadership

Winston Churchill and the Art of Leadership PDF Author: William Nester
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1526781255
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
A unique biography that explores how Churchill viewed, pursued, and used power, by the award-winning author of Napoleon and the Art of Diplomacy. Many indeed, are the biographies of Winston Churchill, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. But what was that influence and how did he use it in the furtherance of his and his country’s ambitions? For the first time, Professor William Nestor has delved into the life and actions of Churchill to examine just how skillfully he manipulated events to place him in positions of power. His thirst for power stirred political controversy wherever he intruded. Those who had to deal directly with him either loved or hated him. His enemies condemned him for being an egoist, publicity hound, double-dealer, and Machiavellian, accusations that his friends and even he himself could not deny. He could only serve Britain as a statesman and a reformer because he was a wily politician who won sixteen of twenty-one elections that he contested between 1899 and 1955. The House of Commons was Churchill’s political temple, where he exalted in the speeches and harangues on the floor and the backroom horse-trading and camaraderie. Most of his life he was a Cassandra, warning against the threats of Communism, Nazism, and nuclear Armageddon. With his ability to think beyond mental boxes and connect far-flung dots, he clearly foretold events to which virtually everyone else was oblivious. Yet he was certainly not always right and was at times spectacularly wrong. This is the first book that explores how Churchill understood and asserted the art of power, mostly through hundreds of his own insights expressed through his speeches and writings.