Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

by Thomas E. Ricks
Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

by Thomas E. Ricks

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Overview

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!

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780143110880
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 05/01/2018
Pages: 368
Sales rank: 310,236
Product dimensions: 5.47(w) x 8.39(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its "Future of War" project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he covered U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His newest book, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, is a New York Times bestseller.

Table of Contents

1 The Two Winstons 1

2 Churchill the Adventurer 6

3 Orwell the Policeman 23

4 Churchill: Down and Out in the 1930s 45

5 Orwell Becomes "Orwell": Spain 1937 65

6 Churchill Becomes "Churchill": Spring 1940 84

7 Fighting the Germans, Reaching out to the Americans: 1940-1941 109

8 Churchill, Orwell, and the Class War in Britain: 1941 126

9 Enter the Americans: 1941-1942 148

10 Grim Visions of the Postwar World: 1943 164

11 Animal Farm: 1943-1945 174

12 Churchill (and Britain) in Decline and Triumph: 1944-1945 188

13 Churchill's Revenge: The War Memoirs 211

14 Orwell in Triumph and Decline: 1945-1950 221

15 Churchill's Premature Afterlife: 1950-1965 238

16 Orwell's Extraordinary Ascension: 1950-2016 245

Afterword: The Path of Churchill and Orwell 265

Acknowledgments 271

Notes 275

Index 327

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