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Great Contemporaries is a collection of 25 short biographical essays about famous people, written by Winston Churchill. The original collection was published in 1937 and included 21 essays mainly written between 1928 and 1931.
Apr 5, 2013 · It is by far the most important, instructive edition of Churchill’s famous personality sketches ever published—masterfully edited with a new introduction by James W. Muller and authoritative footnotes by Muller, Erica Chenoweth and Paul Courtenay.
- At Harrow
- Conflict and Resolution
- Coming Together
- Forever Kipling
- Endnotes
On 29 October 1941, Prime Minister Churchill visited his old school at Harrow. “Another lesson I think we may take,” he told students, “is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must ‘meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same.’”3 Churchill was quoting Kipling’s famous poem If.Writte...
Before the war, Rudyard Kipling had opposed the Liberal government’s Home Rule Bill, to grant self-government and autonomy to Ireland. Churchill was one of the government’s chief advocates. Kipling hoped that the government might back down and strongly distrusted Churchill’s intentions. From Switzerland, wrote Andrew Lycett, Kipling peppered Max Ai...
In the years that followed, Churchill and Kipling corresponded over their mutual interest in literature. In 1928, they were both guests at the annual general meeting of Fellows of the Royal Society of Medicine in London. It fell to Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to deliver the Loyal Toast, and in it, he expressed his admiration for th...
Churchill quoted Kipling in theMalakand Field Force, Thoughts and Adventures, Great Contemporaries, and his memoirs of both World Wars.10 His letters too invoked Kipling. To his wife, away on a Pacific cruise, he wrote on New Year’s Eve 1934: “So now I suppose you right in the middle of the Indian Ocean, ‘so bright, so calm, so blooming blue’ as Ki...
1 Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries: Churchill Reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin, Balfour, and Other Giants of His Age. (Wilmington, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012), 420. 2 Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations. (New York: Rosetta Books, 2013), 9. 3 Winston S. Churchill [g...
Oct 17, 2008 · The central theme of Churchill’s collection is the group of British statesmen who dominated politics at the end of the last and beginning of this century: Balfour, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Morley, Asquith, Curzon.
Great Contemporaries. Insightful biographical sketches of major historical figures of the twentieth century, from the incomparable British statesman. Winston S. Churchill was awarded the...
Apr 7, 2017 · This is a collection of 25 short biographical essays about famous people, written and published by Winston Churchill before his first tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister from 1940-1945. The...
Neville Chamberlain, perhaps Churchill’s most vexing political opponent at the time Great Contemporaries was published, wrote to Churchill on 4 October 1937: “How you can go on throwing off these sparkling sketches with such apparent ease & such sustained brilliance… is a constant source of wonder to me.”
