Wheatcroft, Geoffrey

Winston Churchill towered over his own age, when he was variously described as ‘the saviour of his country’, ‘the leader of humanity’, or ‘the man of the century’. More remarkably, he has towered over fifty years and more since his since his death in 1965. He overshadows both his country, whose recent history has been called ‘an extended footnote to Churchill’, and the United States, where a great cult of Churchill has burgeoned. This account of Churchill’s life and afterlife has been more than ten years in the making. It is not a conventional biography but an account of Churchill’s long life, the cult that arose almost immediately after his death, and his place in popular culture, up to the Oscar-winning film ‘Darkest Hour’ in 2017.