Description
This new edition of the candid writings of Churchill's doctor, Lord Moran, his devoted friend and confidant, covers the war years and contains material not previously revealed. The new extracts help to shed light on how the great man faced up to and absorbed the strain of events between 1940 and 1945, the tremendous burden of his responsibilites, and his extraordinary resolution. We hear of both weaknesses and strengths: his rages, his jokes and salty comments, his lapses of judgement, his occasional barbed remark and endearing playfulness. Lord Moran was with Churchill at the great wartime meetings and conferences and was able to record remarkable details of Roosevelt, Stalin and the whole cast of military and civilian leaders in the fight against Hitler.
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In January 1940, at Scapa Flow on the northern tip of Scotland, when the United States committed its support to Churchill and England; at the White House twelve months later, after Pearl Harbor, when President Roosevelt and the prime minister sealed their alliance; at Casablanca, Moscow, Teheran, Quebec, Yalta, and Potsdam?wherever Churchill traveled, conferred, maneuvered, and negotiated throughout the course of the Second World War?Lord Moran, his personal physician and confidant, was also there. An eyewitness to history in the making, Moran recorded in his diaries Churchill’s perspectives on momentous world events and on the world leaders who shaped them, men like Roosevelt, Stalin, and Charles de Gaulle. Out of Moran’s keenly observant and deeply felt diaries, however, emerges more than a heroic portrait of a twentieth-century titan. Illuminated, too, is the more private and supremely human man: his strengths and failings, his jokes and rages, the flashes of wit, the occasional foolishness, an endearing playfulness. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs, this candid and controversial memoir truly profiles the singular statesman who embodied the soul of a nation?if sometimes with his shoes off. ?Illuminating and engrossing ... highly intelligent and very well-written ... the prose is lively, sometimes amusing, often illuminated by apt metaphors.”?The New York Times Book Review ?Eloquent and amazingly forthright.... Lord Moran’s pages scintillate with the thrust and parry of famous men’s verbal exchanges.”?Chicago Tribune
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