Churchill Defiant: Fighting On: 1945-1955

Winston Churchill rages against time and his own mortality in this tumultuous political drama of his last ten years of public life. Here is Churchill at his most outrageous, maddening, and devious?but also at his most human, courageous, and defiant.

"I am an obstinate pig." This was how Winston Churchill described himself.

At the end of July 1945, Winston Churchill was a defeated man?hurled from power by the British people at the end of the war in which he had just saved his country.

Churchill Defiant is the story of how, when it seemed impossible, Churchill fought his way back over the next six years to the center of great events?the only place he ever wanted to be. In 1951, at last prime minister once more, he was ready to begin his dash to win "the last prize I seek": the enduring peace that had eluded the world after Hitler's defeat.

But Churchill's battles were just beginning. He would have to wage war with both his closest colleagues and his most indispensable allies, the Americans, to get where none of them wanted him to go: the negotiating table with the Soviets.

Barbara Leaming has written a gripping, fast-paced narrative of bare-knuckle politics, of life-and-death decisions, of old grudges and fresh blame. It is the story of how, between 1945 and 1955, Churchill simultaneously fought to prevent a third world war and to defy his own mortality as the clock ticked away and time threatened to run out for him.

This is Winston Churchill in close-up?a compelling, vivid, and deeply poignant portrait of the great man at a time when almost no one wanted him to remain on the public stage and when he was willing to do absolutely anything to stay there.

Barbara Leaming is the author of two New York Times bestselling biographies and three New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her Most recent book, a biography of John F. Kennedy, focused on the influence of British history and culture on the thirty-fifth president. She was the first to write extensively about the extraordinary influence of Winston Churchill on Kennedy's intellectual formation and political strategies. Her articles have appeared in many publications in the United States and Europe, including the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and the Times of London. She is married and lives in Connecticut.