Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955

by Paul Addison

Overview

'The best one-volume study of Churchill yet available.' David Cannadine, Observer
'Magisterial.' Vernon Bogdanor, New Statesman
'A tour de force... A masterly chronicle of Churchill as a domestic figure rather than as the bulldog wartime leader, and one of the most subtle portraits of him as a politician. Addison revises the view of Churchill as uninterested and out of his depth in domestic affairs, painting instead a nuanced picture of a canny parliamentarian. Churchill changed parties twice but managed to accomplish the change, writes Addison, 'with exceptional dexterity', making it appear as if he were maintaining his principles while the parties changed theirs... Addison's most interesting assertion is that the rise of Hitler saved Churchill from drifting into right-wing irrelevance. Most impressively, Addison doesn't settle for easy classifications, admitting that 'Churchill... is a man of whom almost everything that can be said is true in part.'' Kirkus Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571296408
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	01/17/2013
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	518
File size:	9 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Addison
Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955 and Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945-1951 are being reissued in Faber Finds. As is The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain which he co-edited with Jeremy Crang. His latest book, published by The Oxford University Press, is No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-war Britain.

Editorial Reviews

During his lifetime, Churchill was generally overestimated as a military leader and underestimated as a domestic politician. Addison's achievement in this balanced and entertaining book is to narrow the gap between these perceptions, showing that Churchill's wartime and peacetime careers exhibited the same errors of judgment and intuitive genius. ``He was not so much a character in British politics,'' writes the author, ``as a number of different characters all played by the same actor.'' By the end of his career, this ``most protean of personalities,'' who kept a statue of Napoleon near his desk, had held all three top government appointments-President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had introduced an astonishing quantity of legislation, first as a ``radical'' Liberal, later as a Conservative. But Addison also reminds us that this heir to the Empire blamed its decline on the advances of democracy and universal franchise, particularly for women. Essentially, Churchill felt his country had abandoned the ``masculine'' democracy of 1914 for a ``feminine'' one after 1928, a belief that made him sound increasingly reactionary. Churchill's fascination with Mussolini contrasts with his early, energetic resistance to Hitler; and, though opposed to Bolshevism, he courted Russia as an ally after 1934. And so it was that in the summer of 1940, this aristocratic careerist eventually ``met the British people marching in the same direction.'' It was an historic role, a role for which Churchill had been rehearsing for decades. He remembered the war effort years later with uncharacteristic humility. ``It was the nation and the race dwelling round the globe that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.'' (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

First published in Britain in 1993, Addison's (history, Univ. of Edinburgh) study of the domestic policy of Churchill serves to balance the many accounts that focus on war and diplomacy. Addison shows us a Churchill who was not interested in party labels and in fact preferred coalitions across party lines, who rather consistently advocated social reform but fought socialism, and who beamed paternalistically on the working class but viewed the upper middle classes with puzzled antipathy. Exceptionally balanced and readable, this book should be purchased by any library with significant holdings on Churchill.-Nancy C. Cridland, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington

Library Journal