For his 150th birthday, Winston Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts joins Matthew d’Ancona to reveal this towering figure of world history in his full complexity.
Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world.
Andrew Roberts is his definitive biographer: the first to have access to over 40 collections of private papers from the Churchill archive, and to George VI’s private diaries detailing their meetings. Now, on the 150thanniversary of Churchill’s birth, Roberts joins us to share in a goldmine of revelations, sharing Churchill’s faults and virtues in full and providing the fullest account yet of his character.
He will explore Churchill’s titanic capacity for work (and drink), his ability see the big picture, his willingness to take risks and insistence on being where the action was, his good humour even in the most desperate circumstances, the breadth and strength of his friendships and his extraordinary propensity to burst into tears at unexpected moments. Above all, he will show us the wellsprings of his personality – his lifelong desire to please his father (even long after his father’s death) but aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost everyone else, his love of the British Empire, his sense of history and its connection to the present.
Tickets to this event are half-price for members of How To +.
Praise for Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walking With Destiny:
‘This terrific book, which bursts with character, humour and incident on almost every page … is undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
‘The best single-volume life imaginable’ Simon Heffer, Sunday Telegraph
‘It’s the sort of biography that, one feels, Churchill himself would have wanted. Colossal, energetic, deeply knowledgeable, properly critical, but also sympathetic and, in places, deliciously funny’ Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
‘An original portrait of an all-too-familiar figure … He enriches the saga with wonderful examples of Churchill’s aristocratic eccentricity, glittering oratory and wit’ Piers Brendon, Literary Review
