Warlord : A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874–1945

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT WHAT this book is—and is not. It is the very human story of Winston Churchill’s military life and of a young man’s quest for military adventure, which, combined with his ambitious, up-and-down political career, carried him to the leadership of Great Britain in 1940—and the historic years as generalissimo that followed.What Churchill wrote of his youth summed up his entire life. From the time he graduated from Sandhurst in 1894 into a world that opened to him “like Aladdin’s cave,” “he never had time to turn round.” His life became “like an endless moving picture in which one was an actor. On the whole Great Fun!” What Churchill neglected to mention was that in the moving picture of his life he was not merely an actor but the star.Warlord is less about events and more about Churchill the man: his leadership, his triumphs, and his failures. While there is—of necessity—a certain level of selectivity, on balance the reader will find it a faithful account of an extraordinary military life that encompassed most of the seminal events of the twentieth century, culminating in the greatest, most devastating war in the history of planet Earth. Carlo D'Este's brilliant new biography examines Winston Churchill through the prism of his military service as both a soldier and a warlord: a descendant of Marlborough who, despite never having risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel, came eventually at age sixty-five to direct Britain's military campaigns as prime minister and defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito for the democracies.