Thucydides biography summary of winston churchill

  • Like Thucydides, Churchill wrote to teach: to convey what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done.
  • The enduring myth of Churchill as the Prime Minister who saved Britain from Nazi invasion in 1940 tends to overshadow his reputation as a.
  • Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the foundation-point of the historical discipline, placed speech-making at the heart of the narrative.

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    Rhetoric and Political Intervention — Churchill’s World War II Speeches in Context

    Bibliography

    • Addison, P. (1975) The Road to 1945 (London: Jonathan Cape).

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    • Cadogan, A. (1971) The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M., 1938–1945, David Dilks (ed.) (London: Cassell).

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    • Carlton, D. (2000) Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

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    • Churchill, W. (1942) Mein Bundesgenosse (Berlin: Nibelungen-Verlag).

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    • Churchill, W. (1974a) ‘Broadcast of 22 June 1941’, Vol. VI, in R.R. James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers/R.R. Bowker Company).

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    • Churchill, W. (1974b) ‘Broadcast of 24 August 1941’, in R.R. James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963 (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers/R.R. Bowker Company).

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    • Ciano, G. (1947) Ciano’s Diary 1939–19

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      Clio Unbound

      1Churchill spent his entire career thinking, speaking and writing as a historian. Although he never received any formal training in history and in fact recoiled from being considered as an academic historian (Churchill, History, inom, Preface, viii), Churchill showed a natural appetite for the stories of great deeds and great men which, in his eyes, formed the very stuff of history (Addison 36). More than anything else, history writing provided Churchill with the means of producing a rolling commentary on his own life, where snapshot or grand scale biographies often intersected with autobiography. “Leaving the past to History” was one thing; another, as Churchill wrote in a draft note to Stalin in early 1944, “[was] to be one of the historians” (Reynolds 38).1

      2Much to his satisfaction, Churchill did become one of them, earning the respect of the finest academic historians of his age as well as the sincere admiration of a vast retinue of distinguished fans, far beyo

    • thucydides biography summary of winston churchill

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      The blurb to Kagan’s new book is highly tempting: “In Thucydides Kagan turns his attention from the Peloponnesian War itself to the author who so magnificently first chronicles it: Thucydides, the first truly modern historian.” Few scholars have thought longer and harder than Kagan about the Peloponnesian War and the historian who invented it,1 and he does here succeed in offering a concise and approachable presentation of the problems that he sees in Thucydides’ account. As such, this book may be useful to those who want a quick overview of Kagan’s considered ideas on this subject. All the same—and I do not like to have to say this about the work of a distinguished senior historian generally courteous in his references to other scholars—it should not have been published as it stands. Large portions of the book are taken verbatim (or with the slightest of verbal changes) from Kagan’s earlier books, including both his four-volume re-telling of