'His book is timely and a triumph. Roberts manages to convey all the reader needs to know about two men to whom battalions of biographies have been devoted' EVENING STANDARD Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill were two totally opposite leaders - both in what they stood for and in the way in which they seemed to lead. Award-winning historian Andrew Roberts examines their different styles of leadership and draws parallels with rulers from other eras. He also looks at the way Hitler and Churchill estimated each other as leaders, and how it affected the outcome of the war. In a world that is as dependent on leadership as any earlier age, HITLER AND CHURCHILL asks searching questions about our need to be led. In doing so, Andrew Roberts forces us to re-examine the way that we look at those who take decisions for us.

From the summer of 1940 until May 1941, nearly twenty German Abwehr agents were dropped by boat or parachute into England during what was known as Operation Lena, all in preparation for Hitler's planned invasion of England. The invasion itself would never happen and in fact, after the war, one of the Abwehr commanders declared that the operation was doomed to failure. There is no doubt that the operation did indeed become a fiasco, with almost all of the officers being arrested within a very brief period of time. Some of the men were executed, while others became double agents and spied for Britain against Germany. Only one man managed to stay at large for five months before eventually committing suicide: Jan Willem Ter Braak. Amazingly, his background and objectives had always remained unclear, and none of the other Lena spies had ever even heard of him. Even after the opening of the secret service files in England and the Netherlands over 50 years later, Jan Willem Ter Braak remained a 'mystery man', as the military historian Ladislas Farago famously described him. In this book, the author – his near-namesake – examines the short and tragic life of Jan Willem Ter Braak for the first time. Using in-depth research, he investigates the possibility that Ter Braak was sent to kill the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and discovers why his fate has remained largely unknown for so long.

This collection of essays examines the development of Churchill and Hitler as strategic leaders and analyses in particular the impact of their formative years on their leadership styles, operational codes', views on civilmilitary relations, and approaches to the conduct of war at strategic, operational and tactical levels. Ultimately, victory depended on the calculated use of all the means of national power military, political, psychological and economic to achieve the national end. These essays demonstrate it was Churchill who best understood that calculation.

Winston Churchill, indispensable when liberty was in peril, died in 1965. Yet he is still accused of numerous sins, from alcoholism and racism to misogyny and warmongering. On the Internet, he simmers in a stew of imagined misdeeds--using poison gas, firebombing Dresden, causing the Bengal famine, and so on. Drawing on the author's fifty years of research and writing on Churchill, this book uncovers scores of myths surrounding him--the popular and the obscure--to reveal what he really said and did about many issues. Churchill had two personas--one that thought deeply about the nature of humanity, and one that helped solve seemingly intractable problems. In his many decades in public life, he made mistakes, but his faults were well eclipsed by his virtues.

"We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm." --Churchill Winston Churchill's inspiring leadership in the Second World War once made him above criticism. In recent years his record has come under attack from revisionists. In Churchill: A Study in Greatness one of Britain's most distinguished historians rebuts these charges and makes sense of this extraordinary man and his long controversial, colourful, contradictory and heroic career. Geoffrey Best brings out both his strengths and his weaknesses, looking past the many received versions of Churchill in a biography that balances the private and the public man and offers a clear insight into Churchill's greatness. "We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm." --Churchill Winston Churchill's inspiring leadership in the Second World War once made him above criticism. In recent years his record has come under attack from revisionists. In Churchill: A Study in Greatness one of Britain's most distinguished historians rebuts these charges and makes sense of this extraordinary man and his long controversial, colourful, contradictory and heroic career. Geoffrey Best brings out both his strengths and his weaknesses, looking past the many received versions of Churchill in a biography that balances the private and the public man and offers a clear insight into Churchill's greatness.

This book focuses on a close analysis of selected speeches of Winston Churchill in the House of Commons and some of the responses from fellow MPs from 1933-1940 in peace and war, during the rise of Hitler, and concentrates on foreign affairs. The study will appeal to those interested in Churchill, freedom, tyranny, diplomacy, war and conflict, democracy, politics, the 1930s, the Second World War, Britain, the English-speaking world, Canada, the United States, the British Empire and Commonwealth, Europe, France, Asia, Germany, totalitarianism, Parliament and legislative assemblies, rhetoric, language, style, speech-writing, oral and written communication, literature, history and other areas. The debate between autocracy and the tyrannical totalitarian on the one hand and democracy on the other is the debate of those times and ours. The reader will find many parallels, some chilling, with our own times. Churchill and his contemporaries have much to teach us.Churchill was key to our world history and is a key to understanding what is at stake in the world now.

Warrior and writer, genius and crank, rider in the British cavalry’s last great charge and inventor of the tank—Winston Churchill led Britain to fight alone against Nazi Germany in the fateful year of 1940 and set the standard for leading a democracy at war. Like no other portrait of its famous subject, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is a dazzling display of facts more improbable than fiction, and an investigation of the contradictions and complexities that haunt biography. Gretchen Craft Rubin gives readers, in a single volume, the kind of rounded view usually gained only by reading dozens of conventional biographies. With penetrating insight and vivid anecdotes, Rubin makes Churchill accessible and meaningful to twenty-first-century readers with forty contrasting views of the man: he was an alcoholic, he was not; he was an anachronism, he was a visionary; he was a racist, he was a humanitarian; he was the most quotable man in the history of the English language, he was a bore. In crisp, energetic language, Rubin creates a new form for presenting a great figure of history—and brings to full realization the depiction of a man too fabulous for any novelist to construct, too complicated for even the longest narrative to describe, and too valuable ever to be forgotten.

A major new history of Churchill in the 1930s, showing how his meetings at Chartwell, his country home, strengthened his fight against the Nazis In the 1930s, amidst an impending crisis in Europe, Winston Churchill found himself out of government and with little power. In these years, Chartwell, his country home in Kent, became the headquarters of his campaign against Nazi Germany. He invited trusted advisors and informants, including Albert Einstein and T. E. Lawrence, who could strengthen his hand as he worked tirelessly to sound the alarm at the prospect of war. Katherine Carter tells the extraordinary story of the remarkable but little known meetings that took place behind closed doors at Chartwell. From household names to political leaders, diplomats to spies, Carter reveals a fascinating cast of characters, each of whom made their mark on Churchill’s thinking and political strategy. With Chartwell as his base, Churchill gathered intelligence about Germany’s preparations for war—and, in doing so, put himself in a position to change the course of history.

This book is so much more than just another business improvement book. Churchill wrote his memoirs of WWII, all 6000 pages of them. I discovered them by accident, started reading Volume 1. Every so often Churchill would describe a situation from the war and offer the reader some personal advice, in the 5th volume he gave another piece of advice that really chimed with a business issue I recalled. It seemed a shame that this great advice was now lost. This book captures Churchill's advice for a new audience. Each chapter describes the war situation the advice emanates from and then places it into a business context. Unlike most business books, each chapter is full of surprising war stories. Once people start reading it they don't want to put it down. Everyone takes something away that enhances the way they work. It is a great read, improves business performance and provides lots of information about the war. It is so much more than just another business improvement book.

"Masterful . . . The collaboration completes the Churchill portrait in a seamless manner, combining the detailed research, sharp analysis and sparkling prose that readers of the first two volumes have come to expect." - Associated Press Spanning the years 1940 to 1965, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 begins shortly after Winston Churchill became prime minister-when Great Britain stood alone against the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany. In brilliant prose and informed by decades of research, William Manchester and Paul Reid recount how Churchill organized his nation's military response and defence, convinced FDR to support the cause, and personified the "never surrender" ethos that helped win the war. We witness Churchill, driven from office, warning the world of the coming Soviet menace. And after his triumphant return to 10 Downing Street, we follow him as he pursues his final policy goal: a summit with President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leaders. In conclusion, we experience Churchill's last years, when he faces the end of his life with the same courage he brought to every battle he ever fought.