num_pages: 427
description: The remarkable friendship between Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts is a rich study in contrasts. In youth they occupied very different Churchill, the rambunctious and thrusting young aristocrat; Smuts, the ascetic, philosophical Cape farm boy who would go on to Cambridge where, in an unprecedented achievement, he sat both parts of a law tripos simultaneously and won a double first. Brought together first as enemies in the Anglo-Boer War, and later as allies in the First World War, the men forged a friendship that spanned the first half of the twentieth century and endured until Smuts's death in 1950. Richard Steyn, author of Jan Unafraid of Greatness , examines this close friendship through two world wars and the intervening years, drawing on a maze of archival and secondary sources, including letters, telegrams and the voluminous books written about both men. This is a fascinating account of two exceptional men in war and one the leader of an empire, the other the leader of a small fractious member of that empire who rose to global prominence.
language: English
title: Churchill & Smuts: The Friendship
publisher: Jonathan Ball