Spectator Books: Andrew Roberts on Winston Churchill
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2018
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week's books podcast, Sam talks to Andrew Roberts in front of an audience about his new biography on Winston Churchill. It charts the leader's powerful sense of personal destiny, his ambition and bravery as a soldier and a leader. The book interprets the events that defined Churchill, from the Dardanelles disaster of 1915, his years in the political wilderness, and his summoning to save his country in 1940. Sam and Andrew discuss Churchill's belief that he was 'walking with destiny', his prophesies of European disaster in the 1930s, as well as his drinking habits, the racist charges against him, and his singular ability to deliver some of the most memorable speeches of the 20th century.
Presented by Sam Leith at Daunt Books, Marylebone.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. |
| 0:09.3 | I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. |
| 0:11.6 | This week I'm talking to Andrew Roberts, |
| 0:13.7 | but in case you're disconcerted by the slightly different sound quality of the recording, |
| 0:18.2 | that's because this event was recorded in front of a live audience at |
| 0:21.2 | Dorn's Bookshop in Maryland. Hello everybody and welcome. It's a great, great privilege to be |
| 0:28.5 | here chairing Andrew. Andrew, I'd like to start by asking the slightly impolite, but I'm afraid |
| 0:33.1 | very, very obvious question, which is that by your own count, there've been something like a thousand books written on with some Churchill. A thousand and nine. Sorry, ever the historian |
| 0:42.8 | with your precision. So why do we need another one? What is there that's new to say? Well, |
| 0:47.6 | this was something that was a bit nerve-wrapping to me when I signed the contract, as you can imagine |
| 0:52.6 | four years ago. But very fortunately, entirely through serendipity and luck rather than by archival genius, |
| 1:02.0 | I was very fortunate that lots of new sources came together at exactly the right time. |
| 1:09.0 | The Churchill Archives at Cambridge |
| 1:10.9 | already have 2.5 million sets of documents. |
| 1:15.6 | But 41 people started sending in their papers |
| 1:21.3 | since the last big biography of Churchill was published. |
| 1:25.4 | And at the same time, I was able to use the verbatim war cabinet documents, |
| 1:32.5 | which I discovered when I was writing my book, Masters and Commanders. |
| 1:36.4 | There was a set of three volumes of Ivan Myski's diaries, |
| 1:41.3 | the diaries of the Soviet minister to London between 1932 and 43. And there was also |
| 1:49.9 | a great and extremely lucky coup, as far as I was concerned, in George the Six Diaries, |
| 1:56.5 | which the Queen allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to be able to use. |
... |
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