When I came across words that meant nothing to me, not in my vocabulary, I had to stop, and then look up on my Kindle or computer. A surprise was how hostile, land grabbing for the purpose of stealing jewels and anything of value, and simply cruel, were the Vikings. I had never read much of their conquests until now. And of course, had to stop and print out maps of the travels and conquests of the Vikings all over Europe. The English-speaking peoples are invoked against the unreliability of everybody else. This is the sort of history that makes Arthur Bryant read like an academic monograph. Roberts's message is simple: when the English-speaking peoples stand side by side, history has a happy ending; when they do not, civilisation is threatened. The greatest threat has always been the rot within - liberals, churchmen, intellectuals, whose introspection tempts right-minded people to doubt their own moral worth. It is useful to remember that books tell you as much about their author as they do about their subject; indeed, that's sometimes the point of reading them. And these four were penned by none other than Winston S. Churchill -- soldier, painter, politician, historian, war leader, and often voted the greatest Briton -- or even Anglo -- of the entire second millennium. "We are all worms", he once said, "but I do believe that I am a glow-worm".

Here is one of the great books of our age, Winston Churchill's most ambitious work and the crowning achievement of his career. His theme is a noble one, worthy of the great purpose and imaginative scope of its author: Churchill's A History of The English-Speaking Peoples is written with characteristic vigor and poetic flare—always attentive to the broader international picture in its portrayal of individual events. His British patriotism comes across in his elevation of British historical figures and his demonizing of various French (or otherwise non-Anglo-Saxon) entities. In this way, his work can be read as an example of the racial exceptionalism with which many British citizens understood themselves during the early years of the twentieth century. As with the U.S. first edition, there was also a Canadian Book-of-the-Month Club issue similar in style to the Canadian first edition, but bound instead in red cloth with blue spine panels and no head and foot bands. I do not normally choose to read a condensed version of any book, but this is the one that happened to show up in my personal library, so ... Anyway, some of my impressions might not apply perfectly (or at all) to the full version.

I'd like to be notified of new arrivals in the following categories.

Uniquely in the Churchill canon, the British, U.S. and Canadian first editions of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples were published simultaneously. Volume I was published on 23 April 1956. The fourth and final volume was published on 17 March 1958. Beginning with Marlborough's victory at Blenheim in 1704 and ending with Wellington's defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, Churchill recounts Britain's rise to world leadership over the course of the eighteenth century. In this volume Churchill provides an excellent illustration of his unique literary voice, together with an introduction to his thoughts on the forces that shape human affairs. Churchill almost never reflects upon whether exercises of blatant military or political power were 'right'. He does, of course, discuss the political imperatives driving the decisions of the men (mostly) and women who controlled the state at the time. That is his major contribution. Churchill, who excelled in the study of history as a child and whose mother was American, had a firm belief in a so-called " special relationship" between the people of Britain and its Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.) united under the Crown, and the people of the United States who had broken with the Crown and gone their own way. His book thus dealt with the resulting two divisions of the "English-speaking peoples".

On the other hand, I admit some of the things he wrote did make my modern eyes wince. The warning signs were there from the very second chapter, the account of the Bouadicea rebellion: "No less", according to Tactitus, "than seventy thousand citizens and allies were slain" in these three cities. . . . This is probably the most horrible episode which our Island has known. We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprisings of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders' hearth. Well, that's nice. It really says it all, doesn't it? The stupid British natives were too bloodthirsty and resisted the loving embrace of the civilised empire come to invade them, but it's OK because everyone has the right to butcher race traitors. Of the Tasmanian Genocide off Australia he mentions only that the native tribes met a "tragic" end and "were extinct by the beginning of the twentieth century". He can't quite bring himself to say they were exterminated by the British in the only successful genocide in history. In fact, of the entire period of colonialism he remarks: The nineteenth century was a period of purposeful, progressive, enlightened, tolerant civilisation. The stir in the world arising from the French Revolution, added to the Industrial Revolution unleashed by the steam-engine and many key-inventions, led inexorably to the democratic age. . . . At the same time the new British Empire or Commonwealth of Nations was based upon government by consent, and the voluntary association of autonomous states under the Crown. Suffice to say, the fourth volume in particular is stuffed full of some -- how can I put it? -- outdated opinions. As a final example, when discussing early trade unionism in America Churchill notes that the organisations attracted "a host of fanatics ranging from suffragists to single-taxers".The simultaneous four-volume U.S. first edition is certainly less stately in appearance, though in our opinion perhaps excessively maligned as being an unattractive edition. At the independent suggestions of British publisher Newman Flower [2] and American editor Max Perkins, [3] Churchill began the history in the 1930s, during the period that his official biographer Martin Gilbert termed the "wilderness years" when he was not in government. Work was interrupted in 1939 when the Second World War broke out and Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and became Prime Minister a year later. After the war ended in 1945, Churchill was busy, first writing his history of that conflict and then as Prime Minister again between 1951 and 1955, so it was not until the mid-1950s, when Churchill was in his early eighties, that he was able to finish his work .