Richard Holmes's insightful new biography of one of Britain's greatest leaders is both a study in character and the story of an extraordinary career. Much has been written about Churchill's role as British prime minister during the crisis years of the Second World War, but in this book Holmes uses new material to investigate the influences that shaped the man: his troubled schooldays, his flamboyant politician father, Randolph, and his famously attractive American mother, Jennie. Holmes argues that the qualities that made Churchill great also led him to commit catastrophic blunders. The same recklessness that made him a hero when he was a young correspondent during the Boer War arguably cost thousands of Allied lives during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, and may also have contributed to the fall of Singapore in 1942.

Richard Holmes's insightful new biography of one of Britain's greatest leaders is both a study in character and the story

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