Overview

A timely, magisterial new history of Churchill’s life and politics, focusing on his dealings with Russia and the Soviet Union. After his finest hour, winning the Second World War, Winston Churchill and his allies Joseph Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt carved up Eastern Europe. The settlement they reached, later referred to by Churchill as ‘the Iron Curtain’, would utterly change the course of the twentieth century, creating a world of two competing superpowers, which led to the so-called Cold War. One question is vital to understanding the course of that century – why did Winston Churchill and the allies allow Russia to become a dominant superpower, free to threaten the USA and the Western World for the next 40 years? Foremost Churchill scholar Warren Dockter looks afresh at Churchill’s relationship with Russia. He investigates the great man’s Victorian education and his inheritance of his father’s politics, which dominated his worldview with respect to Russia. This is a wide-ranging biography of Churchill's upbringing and the events that have shaped him, woven around his view of the world and of Russia – his great enemy and, as Dockter argues, in many ways the key player in his international political life. It draws on a wealth of previously neglected sources such as the oral histories at Churchill Archives, the Lord Moran Papers, the Diaries of Archibald Clark-Kerr – the British Ambassador to Russia, the Alexander MacCallum Scott diary and Evelyn Shuckburgh’s full diary. This book uncovers a new side to the Churchill story that has some great contemporary relevance, as the 'Russia problem' promises to define politics over the next decade.

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9781399408080

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Warren Dockter is a historian and writer specialising in Churchill Studies. He is the author of Churchill and the Islamic World. He is Honorary Professor of Politics at Aberystwyth University, former Researcher at Clare College Cambridge, and former academic advisor to the Churchill Society. He has contributed to the Daily Telegraph and Western Mail on Winston Churchill, US/UK relations, and the Trump administration.

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