Continue to Pester, Nag and Bite: Churchill's War Leadership

by Martin Gilbert

Book by Martin Gilbert

Genres: World War II, Biography

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

The official biographer of Winston Churchill and a leading historian on the Twentieth Century, Sir Martin Gilbert was a scholar and an historian who, though his 88 books, has shown there is such a thing as “true history”

Born in London in 1936, Martin Gilbert was educated at Highgate School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. He was a Research Scholar at St Anthony's College, and became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1962, and an Honorary Fellow in 1994. After working as a researcher for Randolph Churchill, Gilbert was chosen to take over the writing of the Churchill biography upon Randolph's death in 1968, writing six of the eight volumes of biography and editing twelve volumes of documents. In addition, Gilbert has written pioneering and classic works on the First and Second World Wars, the Twentieth Century, the Holocaust, and Jewish history.
Gilbert drove every aspect of his books, from finding archives to corresponding with eyewitnesses and participants that gave his work veracity and meaning, to finding and choosing illustrations, drawing maps that mention each place in the text, and compiling the indexes. He travelled widely lecturing and researching, advised political figures and filmmakers, and gave a voice and a name “to those who fought and those who fell.”

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Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent short overview of the attributes of Winston Churchill's leadership as prime minister during the Second World War. Originating as a 2002 White House talk, Gilbert pared his analysis down to the basics, identifying the various qualities Churchill displayed and then illustrating them with contemporary anecdotes and quotes as examples. Pithy and insightful, it is the sort of short book that only someone as knowledgeable about their subject as Gilbert could achieve as successfully as he did here. Anyone interested in learning more about how Churchill operated as a leader would do well to start by reading this book, which is a small but valuable gem of its type.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to write a full review later but I've got notes to write but here's some quick bullet points:

- This is based on a lecture given post-9/11 about Churchill's leadership
- I'm surprised no imaginative bro publisher hasn't turned it into a 'Lessons in Leadership: How Churchill won the War'
- Martin Gilbert is far less nuanced in this than he is in his longer works. No many warts on this version of Churchill. He's the man behind every key decision, even when the record, e.g. on Roosevelt deciding to go Germany first, suggests it was a decision made by the Americans. Now, Martin Gilbert is a history who spent a large chunk of his life studying and writing about Churchill. I'm like a little mosquito buzzing in his ear. But he's quite patronising about parliamentary opposition to Churchill too. But I put some of this down to the fact that this was a lecture.
- Churchill might be one of the few people about whom I have read a surprisingly large amount of books and who I am fascinated by. Warts and all.
- This made me want to finally read Gilbert (and Randolph Churchill's) big multi-volume Churchill biography, which I read the war volumes of a long time ago.
- Personally the best Churchill book I've read is The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor, by Jonathan Rose.