num_pages: 306
description: In 1937, Winston Churchill wrote, "I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour." It was this romantic vision of Britain as a world power that guided Churchill but in the end was destined to failure.Churchill's public life was filled with irony. As a member of an aristocratic family, he supported Lloyd George and accommodated himself to the British social revolution brought about by the Labour party after 1946; reaching the apex of his career as a Tory prime minister, he was regarded with suspicion by the Conservative party regulars; and as a staunch anti-Communist, he led Britain into an alliance with Stalin. The supreme irony, however, was that he called forth in World War II the very force—American nationalism—that guaranteed the demise of the empire.The author has synthesized the existing voluminous material on the remarkable wartime prime minister ad drawn heavily from Churchill's own writings to present a picture, not only of a heroic figure of British history but also of a tragic hero who said at the end of his career that his work had "all been for nothing . . . . The Empire I believed in has gone."
language: English
title: Churchill: Retreat from Empire
titlecomplete: Churchill: Retreat from Empire
characters: Winston Churchill
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Scholarly Resources