Curt Zoller - Annotated Bibliography of Works About Sir Winston S. Churchill

Annotated Bibliography of Works About
Sir Winston S. Churchill

Curt J. Zoller

PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE CHURCHILL CENTRE

First published 2004 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Copyright 2004, Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Annotated bibliography of works about Sir Winston S. Churchill / Curt J. Zoller.
p. cm.
Published in association with the Churchill Centre [i.e. Center].
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7656-0734-4 (alk. paper)
1. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 18741965Bibliography. 2. Great BritainPolitics and
government20th centuryBibliography. 3. Prime ministersGreat Britain
BiographyBibliography. I. Zoller, Curt J., 1920 II. Churchill Centre,
Washington, D.C.
Z8169.45.A56 2002
[DA566.9.C5]
016.941084092dc21
2001049602

ISBN 13: 9780765607348 (hbk)

The first biography of Winston Spencer Churchill was published in 1905 when Churchill was thirty-one years old. By 1935, when he turned sixty, he had been the subject of some eighteen works, a fairly reasonable if not overwhelming number for a living statesman. Yet by 1965, when he died, nearly 250 books had been devoted to him, and today the number is approaching 650. And there are literally thousands of works extensively involving Churchill, significant periodical articles, dissertations, theses, and book reviews.

The difference is 1940that salient, pivotal year when the fate of human liberty hung by a thread, when only one nation remained in arms to defend it, and when that nation was led by Winston Churchill. That signal year was unmatched in the twentieth century. Churchill himself often cited the year of his life that he would most like to relive: Nothing, he said, surpasses 1940.

Since then a host of authors around the globe, admirers and critics alike, the serious and absurd, the plodding and inspirational, have been writing about this erratic genius who proved in 1940 that one person can change history: who, by his stubborn determination to fight on against a seemingly invincible Nazi Germany, made it possible for governments of ordered liberty to survive. And they are still writing: At this instant over a score of new works about Churchill are being penned, and others planned, by writers not yet born when Winston Churchill died. The world has never lost its fascination with Sir Winston.

Part of the reason for Churchills endurance as a subject is certainly the official biography, begun by his son Randolph and carried on after 1968 by Sir Martin Gilbert. At eight biographic and sixteen document volumes, it is already the longest biography ever written, with seven more volumes of documents still purported to come. Another part is Churchills own elaborate archiving of his immense collection of papers, over a million of them, now housed at Churchill College, Cambridge, and being readied for availability over the Internetand Churchills own writings, over forty titles in over sixty volumes, with thousands of editions, impressions, and translations. Chief among these writings are his memoirs of the twentieth centurys greatest conflicts, when he alone held high executive office in both World Wars. He was careful to say these works were not histories of those conflicts: This is not historythis is my case.

What is it about the man who led one small country in a war most people now alive do not remember that engenders such interest so many years after his death? I will answer in one word: longevity. Winston Churchill was politically prominent for sixty years. Think about thatsixty years, three times Franklin D. Roosevelts tenure.

Churchill defies comparison. Most people know of him only through reading about World War IIone-twelfth of his political career. But he also held high office in World War I. He fought for things we find familiar: free trade, state welfare, peace in the Middle East, dtente with former mortal enemies, European union, nuclear sanity. He bestrode the scene from the cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898 to the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945. He was in office to observe the rise of Bolshevik Russia in 1917 and, though out of office, so prominent as to make people listen when he warned about Soviet intentions in 1946. In his books, articles, and published speeches, he produced over 20 million words. He is anything but a one-dimensional figure, and his mistakes, like his triumphs, were on a grand scale.

That is what makes Churchill so fascinating. Even when we disagree with him, never do we find ourselves saying, how amoral, how despicable, how shabby. And, as we study his life, we find him saying and doing things that are always worth considering by thoughtful people. Thus he has become an epic figure, as fascinating to writers who would demythologize him as to those who maintain that, warts and all, he really was the Man of the Twentieth Century.

The Churchill Centre exists to support this curiosity of critics and friends alike, a vehicle for understanding not only Churchill but the great impulses of his time, as an example to our own, in which he is by no means irrelevant. His accomplishments affect us yetfrom his championing of the rights of black South Africans to his Boer captors in Pretoria in 1899; to his key role in creating the British welfare state in the early 1900s; to his drawing the borders of the modern Middle East, warning of the danger of some future bully in Iraq; to his part in the Irish treaty, which kept the peace in Ireland for fifty years; to his prescient warnings about Hitler, and later the Soviets; to his less memorable but not altogether misplaced warnings about the danger of sectarian violence in places like India, South Africa, the Balkans, the Near and Far East. Study history, study history, Churchill once enjoined an admirer; in history lie all the lessons of statecraft. And, in more private moments, Churchill would paraphrase the warning of George Santayana, that those who refuse to understand the mistakes of the past are condemned to relive them.