It is easy to find respected historians who write about Churchill. It is not so easy to find respected historians who write admiring words about Churchill.


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John Lukacs is one of the unusual. His Five Days in London: May appeared in and focused closely on a short week when no Prime Minister could have won World War II but surely might have lost it. Now the same press, Yale, has published Churchill: At about two hundred pages the new book is as brief as the other.

But it takes as broad a view of Churchill as Five Days was carefully narrowed. The present volume is a study of the reach and power of Churchill's mind: It is also explicitly a reply to some well-known criticisms of Churchill as thinker and actor and writer.

Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. by John Lukacs

This is not the right book to hand to the college Junior newly interested in war or British politics. It is, however, a strong and successful collection of essays that well serve more advanced students and teachers in the fields of history, historiography, political science, and to a lesser degree, military science. Lukacs opens up old questions and inquires into new trends of scholarship on Churchill with the enthusiasm of an amateur and the skills of an author of two dozen volumes.

It's a book of history, but it reads as easily as a novel; John Lukacs really knows how to write history books that grabs the reader from page Daniel rated it liked it Nov 26, Liz Barlow rated it liked it Feb 04, Matthew Kemp rated it it was amazing Jun 24, Gustavo Passos rated it it was ok Dec 12, Grace rated it really liked it Jan 06, Jimbob rated it really liked it Jun 30, Gabrielius Lapinskas rated it it was ok Sep 07, Peter rated it liked it Jan 16, Ransom Becker rated it liked it Jan 28, Helaja rated it liked it Nov 26, Anabel Reissig rated it it was amazing Jan 25, Alona rated it really liked it May 01, Vitor rated it really liked it Jan 06, Glenio Madruga rated it really liked it May 15, Giacomo Busca rated it it was amazing Dec 04, Max rated it it was amazing Jan 02, Ray rated it it was amazing Nov 11, Duncan Brown rated it really liked it Sep 07, Geoffrey Rose rated it really liked it Jul 23, Jonathan rated it it was amazing Mar 25, Sinesio rated it it was ok Jun 13, Patrick rated it it was amazing Apr 23, Francesco Rizzo Marullo rated it it was ok Nov 21, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.


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Lukacs was born in Budapest to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. His parents divorced before the Second World War. During the German occupation of Hungary in he evaded deportation to the death camps, and survived the siege of Budapest.

The Journal of Military History

In , as it became clear that Hungary was going to Lukacs was born in Budapest to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. In , as it became clear that Hungary was going to be a repressive Communist regime, he fled to the United States. In the early s however, Lukacs wrote several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue. In his history, he asserted that he had never opposed the invasion, that the disagreement with the Americans was simply a matter of proper timing to carry it out in and not before , and even considered himself as its originator, p.

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Churchill reported in his Triumph and Tragedy that the Soviets had agreed to a In fact, Churchill and Molotov had extracted from Churchill and Eden a higher percentage for the Soviet Union than this, p. Lukacs also walks over well-trodden ground when he discusses Churchill as a statesman in the s, during the Second World War, and in the early stages of the Cold War. Crucially, the work reminds us of the huge gap between perceptions of Churchill pre- and post, and makes the bold assertion that had it not been for Hitler, Churchill would have been a perhaps interesting but surely secondary figure in the history of Britain and of the world.

He relies on empirical and qualitative evidence to help formulate his opinions and to dismiss criticism from or direct it at others.

He uses a range of both primary and secondary sources, mostly in the main text, but also in footnotes. However, one is left questioning whether Lukacs has done much research for this book. Nevertheless, we can presume that he is familiar with the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, as he gives a short but intimate description of the place in the preface. Croom Helm, , pp. Consequently, historians writing in the twenty-first century, such as Lukacs, are privileged in that they can view appeasement, Churchill and his memoirs from a new perspective.

In doing so, he reveals his own criteria for writing a biography of Churchill: Was the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship unique, and is a twenty-first century reconstruction and interpretation of it long overdue? Was Churchill a historian?