Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill - Michael Shelden
Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill - Michael Shelden
Non-Fiction
Pages: 383
Churchill was a man who had not one but two political lives, and given that his second encompassed the Second World War it's hardly a surprise that in any biography the bulk of the attention is paid to his later career. The mental image of Churchill we all have is from his war years - the cigar, the bowler hat, the V for Victory signal. But Churchill was 66 years old when he became Prime Minister and he had spent a good twenty-plus years in relative political exile before that, so it is all too easy to forget his youth, his meteoric rise, his position as the bright young buck of first the Tory and then the Liberal party.
This excellent and thoroughly enjoyable biography covers only a portion of Churchill's remarkable life - his early political career from his first position as an MP to the beginning of his downfall after Gallipoli. Churchill had quite the spectacular rise to power, becoming Home Secretary and then First Lord of the Admiralty when only in his thirties - and as equally spectacular a fall after the disaster at Gallipoli.
In focusing on such a brief period, Shelden has the luxury of examining Churchill's life in more detail than most other single-volume biographies have the opportunity to - and as a result some of the incidents and encounters in this were completely new to me. Churchill's romantic travails prior to his marriage and his relationship with his parents really helped to shed light on his character, and I have no doubt these will influence any future books on Churchill I read.
That an entire book can be written about such a short period is to testament to the life Churchill led - a book that doesn't include the Second World War, or indeed Churchill's early adventures in the Sudan and the Boer War, and yet manages to be as entertaining, enjoyable and informative as this one, is surely to the credit of both the subject and the author.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 383
Churchill was a man who had not one but two political lives, and given that his second encompassed the Second World War it's hardly a surprise that in any biography the bulk of the attention is paid to his later career. The mental image of Churchill we all have is from his war years - the cigar, the bowler hat, the V for Victory signal. But Churchill was 66 years old when he became Prime Minister and he had spent a good twenty-plus years in relative political exile before that, so it is all too easy to forget his youth, his meteoric rise, his position as the bright young buck of first the Tory and then the Liberal party.
This excellent and thoroughly enjoyable biography covers only a portion of Churchill's remarkable life - his early political career from his first position as an MP to the beginning of his downfall after Gallipoli. Churchill had quite the spectacular rise to power, becoming Home Secretary and then First Lord of the Admiralty when only in his thirties - and as equally spectacular a fall after the disaster at Gallipoli.
In focusing on such a brief period, Shelden has the luxury of examining Churchill's life in more detail than most other single-volume biographies have the opportunity to - and as a result some of the incidents and encounters in this were completely new to me. Churchill's romantic travails prior to his marriage and his relationship with his parents really helped to shed light on his character, and I have no doubt these will influence any future books on Churchill I read.
That an entire book can be written about such a short period is to testament to the life Churchill led - a book that doesn't include the Second World War, or indeed Churchill's early adventures in the Sudan and the Boer War, and yet manages to be as entertaining, enjoyable and informative as this one, is surely to the credit of both the subject and the author.