Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality ― What He Actually Did and Said

Winston Churchill, indispensable when liberty was in peril, died in 1965. Yet he is still accused of numerous sins, from alcoholism and racism to misogyny and warmongering. On the Internet, he simmers in a stew of imagined misdeeds—using poison gas, firebombing Dresden, causing the Bengal famine, and so on. Drawing on the author’s fifty years of research and writing on Churchill, this book uncovers scores of myths surrounding him—the popular and the obscure—to reveal what he really said and did about many issues. Churchill had two personas—one that thought deeply about the nature of humanity, and one that helped solve seemingly intractable problems. In his many decades in public life, he made mistakes, but his faults were well eclipsed by his virtues.

Richard M. Langworth founded in 1968 the Churchill Study Unit and its journal, Finest Hour, which he edited for 35 years. Since 2014 he has been Senior Fellow for the Churchill Project at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He lives in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, and Eleuthera, Bahamas.