Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955

Churchill Defiant by Barbara Leaming.

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Harper (October 12, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0061337587

 

 

From Booklist

Expelled from power in 1945 by the British electorate, Winston Churchill could have retired, written memoirs, and basked in national esteem for his wartime leadership. The Second World War did come out, but Churchill also clung to politics for another decade, frustrating the ambition for the top spot of the Conservative Party’s younger, glamour-boy heir apparent, Anthony Eden. Leaming’s absorbing chronicle depicts Churchill’s conviction of his indispensability and Eden’s exasperations within a sequence of schemes and cabals of Tory factions to replace the former with the latter. Such plots the wily Churchill repeatedly circumvented by reneging on promises to retire and by public speeches that effectively (though deceptively) allayed rumors about his health, diminished by several strokes. Illuminating Churchill’s determination to defy time, Leaming alludes to his previous comebacks and to his belief that he alone could negotiate with Stalin and his successors, a conceit with which the author makes some sport. In the context of Britain’s grim postwar years of austerity and the ascension of Elizabeth II, Leaming produces eminently readable political history. --Gilbert Taylor

I liked reading about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and WWII, and so because Churchill resided in those books so much that I needed to read something about the man himself.

Obviously, I had read of the war years and so I decided on reading this particular book because it was about the years following the war.

Churchill was quite the politician.  After the was and after being expelled from power, Churchill did NOT retire.  He set his mind to getting back the power he once had.  The ten years following, he was exposed to much bad health but still persisted.  Always of the mind that they needed him to stay and to lead .

The book lets you know the sort of man Churchill was, not just what he did in the war, where he lead so extraordinarily well.

If one reads of the Roosevelt's and the Churchill's one begins to wonder what happened to leaders who really care?