The Private Lives of Winston Churchill - Softcover

Pearson, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1448208076 ISBN 13: 9781448208074

Publisher: Bloomsbury Reader, 2013

Synopsis

He was a lion of a man who helped shape the course of this century with his relentless ambition and fierce political instincts. Few have matched Winston Churchill's cunning or force of will. Few have seen the equal of his audacity on the battlefield or the determination with which he strove toward his own ideal of greatness. At the height of his power, he seemed to embody the ideals of the empire he helped sustain: valor, pride, and above all, tradition. His sense of personal destiny was rooted deeply in the legacy of his birth-right, the heritage of his family, and the awesome responsibility of being born Churchill.

In The Private Lives of Winston Churchill, first published in 1991, John Pearson takes us behind the myth of Churchill and deep into the psychology of a dynasty that some have called the most complicated Anglo-American family of this century. In doing so, he reveals, in rich portraits, some of the family's greatest, most charismatic, and most deeply troubled members and shows us the real, private Winston Churchill.

About this title

About the Author:

John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King's College School, Wimbledon and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read history.

He has worked on various newspapers, including the Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times where for a time he wrote the Atticus column.

After the success of his Life of Ian Fleming, he decamped with wife and family to Rome, where he lived for some years. Mr Pearson returned to England to research and write the life and times of the Kray brothers in The Profession of Violence and has since written many more successful works of both fiction and non-fiction. Biographies remain his specialty with accomplished studies of the Sitwells, Winston Churchill and the Royal Family following his earlier successes.

From Kirkus Reviews:

It may be hard to write anything new about Winston Churchill, but it is even harder to write anything dull about him, as Pearson (The Selling Of the Royal Family, 1986; The Serpent and the Stag, 1984, etc.) proves again here. Pearson's inquiry into Churchill's private life began with his interest in the tragic deaths of three of Churchill's four children: Diana, who killed herself, and Randolph and Sarah, whose drunken escapades became notorious. Mary, the wife of successful Tory politician Christopher Soames, was the only one of Churchill's children to lead a balanced, normal life. Why? Pearson has found some obvious answers, and some more unexpected. It is well known that Churchill's father, Lord Randolph, gave little attention to his son, whom he thought stupid, leaving Winston with an enduring need to prove himself. It is less well known that, as Pearson reveals, Churchill's wife, Clementine, was probably the daughter of one of her mother's lovers, perhaps even, by an irony, a man who was also a lover of Churchill's mother. Churchill's desire to provide a more loving family environment was negated by his ambitions and way of life, and by Clementine, whose energy and interest in her children were never very great. As a result, the children alternated between outrageous pampering, little discipline, and outright neglect. The love affair between Winston and Clementine, often portrayed as idyllic, appears to have been something less than that, with Clementine often overwhelmed by her husband's galvanic energies, deep depressions, boisterous friends, and reckless spending. The explanation for all this may be found more in the conventions of the Victorian era and in the selfishness of a man of towering ambition than in the ``cunning and ruthlessness of the egomaniacal genius'' depicted in the publisher's blurb, but Pearson offers solid insight into one of the most remarkable public men of the century. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Reader
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1448208076
• ISBN 13: 9781448208074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 626