Winston Churchill is one of my heroes and is one of the greatest Englishmen (if half American) in history[1]. So I was delighted to read my friend Tony Cole’s lucid appreciation of Churchill as a writer. Tony runs the popular e-book site, eBookAnoid.com from Australia and he was reporting that the many books of WSC are to become available for download, probably in the Kindle store.
Churhill was a marvellous author and, if he had not been a major world leader during the greatest time of peril in the 20th century, he would have been just as famous as a writer. Journalist, war correspondent, politician, statesman, author and artist. He was a true multi-tasker.
This reminds me of a personal confrontation with the power of Churchill. Back in the early eighties a friend of mine was appointed by Margaret Thatcher as Navy Minister. Shortly afterwards I was invited to the palatial office in Whitehall, with the world map at one end and a large, old-fashioned desk at the other.
This desk was a curiosity. The bottom left-hand drawer was in a sorry state, all pushed in and broken. The story goes that it was kicked in by the great man when he heard of the disaster of Gallopolli, his pet project of the first world war. The battered old drawer is yet another reminder of the multi-faceted Churchill. We can add temper to his list of attributes.
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Britons polled today would probably choose David Beckham or Wayne Rooney. But history is out of fashion and only the present counts. ↩