CHURCHILL, Winston

“ Words are the only things that last forever,"

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Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill is known the world over as the Prime Minister who led Britain with such doggedness during WWII – his sayings and phrases during this period helped form the psyche of a nation.  However, able and devoted politician though he was, Churchill needed an additional income to fund an extravagant lifestyle, so he took to writing – and he wrote prolifically.  Having graduated as a cavalry officer in 1894, Churchill used his influential family to get posted around the world on active service.  In 1896 he arrived in India, where he started supplementing his income by writing articles for British newspapers. He felt that his experiences on the North West Frontier provided him with enough material for a more substantive work, so he wrote his first book of military history, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published in 1898 and he continued to use his military life as a starting point for many of his histories and travelogues.  In 1898 he transferred to the Sudan, joining an attachment of Lancers under Kitchener, and upon returning home he wrote The River War, an account of the British involvement in the Mahdist war.  He resigned from the army in 1899, worked in South Africa as war correspondent for the Morning Post during the Boer War, and entered politics as a Conservative MP at the start of the new century.  His dramatic rise, fall and sideways movements in the corridors of power are well documented, but he also used his knowledge of the political world and access to official documents to enhance his writing, which went on to include family biographies (Lord Randolph Churchill and Marlborough) and multi-volume sets of narrative history, namely World Crisis  (a history of WWI), The Second World War and A History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Churchill’s political abilities cannot be denied, but it is for his writing that he won the Nobel Prize in 1953.  The committee awarded it "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values".