Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked: The Greatest Briton Unmasked
Please try again later. While I may not have agreed with every point that the author made, Prof. Knight does an excellent job of de-bunking a vastly overrated historical figure. This should be compulsory reading for American reactionaries who constantly cite Churchill as an authority figure. He was a reactionary himself, an imperialist, a nincompoop at military strategy, and an economic simpleton.
Knight persuasively and definitively enumerates and describes Churchill's many character flaws. This book shows other side to this Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. An interesting insight into one of Briton's greatest leaders. This book shows other side to this great man and tries to shed some light on where Churchill the man finishes and where Churchill the image begins. One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful.
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An interesting overview of the military and political carrer of An interesting overview of the military and political carrer of this history character from the Boer war to his last goverment in the 's. He was the most over rated leader. Ok he didn,t deal with Hitler and held the kingdom helm in the dark day of but in all the other battles the british lost Norway and France in June and Greece in April His dispersionist strategy added another year at world war two.
A must have book that shed light on this individual. Nigel Knight makes a convincing case that, contrary to the widely-held conventional view of Churchill as a heroic WWII leader, he was in fact a seriously-flawed leader whose misguided machinations resulted in disastrous consequences.
Knight's biographical sketch focuses on Churchill's political career and his leadership during and after WWII. From beginning to end, Knight shows how nearly every strategic and tactical decision taken by Churchill was wrong and worsened the war effort. For example, Knight argues convincingly that Churchill's obsession with peripherally attacking Germany via the Mediterranean front, Germany's so-called "soft underbelly", squandered western military resources and delayed the successful cross-channel invasion by at least a year.
I have read other revisionist histories that also have made the case that Churchill and FDR made major blunders that contributed to fomenting the war and aggravating its results: Knight's book differs from the others because his focus is on Churchill's personality flaws and how they caused him to advocate wrong-headed decisions: I give Knight's work 4 stars because it does not address how Churchill also erred in initially advocating war with Germany and prompting US involvement as is pointed out by the other authors.
Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked
A Chinese proverb states: Once you have finished Nigel Knight's book on the Greatest Briton, you understand why this also applies in Europe. Winston Churchill was active in British politics for half a century, his heyday was the Second World War he helped to bring about. A few months after its outbreak, Churchill became Prime Minister. Over the years to come, he would lead his country into a total war, directed, as British policy had always prescribed, against the strongest power on the continent of Europe.
Churchill's birth practically coincided with the publication of a book, "The Battle of Dorking", which would give rise to a flood of similar stories, all aimed at making the British public sensitive to an invasion of their island. Until that time, British wars had always been fought away from home or somewhere on the high seas, but now the situation seemed to change. In many of these books, the attackers speak German. In this way, an atmosphere of anxiety took hold in the British population, and British policy, willy-nilly, had to take this state of mind into account.
Churchill grew up in this atmosphere and absorbed, no doubt, many of these ideas.
They meshed well with the historical world-view underlying the curriculum of the great British schools that orientated itself on Roman history; such a view did not deal much with questions of a social or an economical nature. Quite naturally, this attitude assumed that other countries also considered history as nothing but a succession of collisions between national powers aiming to expand their possessions at the expense of other such forces - or at least preserve what they had conquered.
Such a perspective would, in the s and 30s, lead many English politicians and other public figures to the assumption that Hitler would attack Britain once he had the means to do so. Such an attitude is borne out by the utterances of members of the British establishment who had undergone a similar education; in the years immediately preceding WW2, Robert Vansittart and Lord Beaverbrook - and certainly not only they - stated that either Germany or Britain had to be destroyed: This, then, was the atmosphere obtaining in Britain when Winston Churchill came to power.
Nigel Knight's book examines in detail the consequences of the decisions he took at various stages of his career: What is not dealt with much in this book are the events during Churchill's decade of internal exile in the s, events which eventually resulted in his return to Whitehall. The author mentions briefly the machinations of the Focus network and Churchill's financial rescue by some generous members of this group, but does not shed much light on the forces involved.
An interested reader will find a wealth of information on this critical aspect of Winston's life in Stefan Scheil's most recent book "Churchill, Hitler und der Antisemitismus".
The author takes pains to dismantle the traditional view that Chamberlain's policy of appeasement towards Hitler had been a mistake and makes it clear that a more aggressive policy would, at that point in time, not have been possible at all. It was the time gained by Chamberlain's tactics which allowed Britian to beef up its defensive airforce, thus winning the Battle of Britain and holding out until Roosevelt had obtained another mandate in late Return to Book Page.
Preview — Churchill by Knight Nigel. The Greatest Briton Unmasked really liked it 4. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself. I "I have not always been wrong. Kindle Edition , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Churchill , please sign up.
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To state the obvious, people admire Churchill. He is regarded by many as a national hero and as one of the greatest leaders of the free world. He is eulogised in place-names across Britain and is firmly woven into society's recollection as the man who guided the British and the then Empire through some of the darkest days of the previous century.
His image is a symbol of Britishness, people recall his speeches and mimic his oratory with glee.
Get your copy today. IF the introduction was written before the book, then the author was interested in the authors agenda more than interested in telling the story of Churchill. Rohan Nijjar marked it as to-read Oct 28, The narrative starts in the s but some of Churchill's most ignominious decisions took place before then such as in Wales and Scotland where he had no qualms in deploying troops into Tonypandy in and tanks into Glasgow in against labourers striking for a fair wage and decent working hours. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
Ironically his ideas for both an unbowed aloof Brit To state the obvious, people admire Churchill. Ironically his ideas for both an unbowed aloof Britain apart from Europe and a Britain as a central part of a united Europe provided a bizarre and contradictory ideological battle for his legacy during the EU referendum. I was interested in this book because A every bookshop shelf groans under the weight of sycophantic Churchill biographies and B his decisions have had a massive and lasting impact on the world.
The book primarily looks at his time as PM during WWII, the period in which he was transformed from a politically outcast former cabinet minister to a name synonymous with British victory. How successful was Churchill? How beneficial were his decisions? Does he deserve the title of "Great Briton" alongside Nelson or Wellington? History is always written by the victors and that is exactly what Churchill did after the war between in "The Second World War". The books earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature, but this book does much to unpick some of the statements which show a clear derivation from actual events corroborated through personal diaries and extensive correspondence.
The first point always made about Churchill is this: He was a John the Baptist type figure, one crying in the wilderness warning others of things to come. Details of Churchill's actual record as a minister during the 's are produced to bring to light that he actually reduced military spending when he was war minister, discounted Japan as an aggressive threat and placed blind faith in antiquated technologies despite clear evidence that the nature of warfare had changed. It was actually Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister blamed by Churchill for not arming Britain, who invested in the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters that helped win the Battle of Britain which is still recognised as Churchill's victory alone.
Chamberlain's legacy is now synonymous with indecision and hand-wringing appeasement. The book catalogues a chain of bad decisions made by Churchill during wartime. Diary excerpt by military top brass, notably Sir Hugh Dowding and Sir Alan Brooke, give contemporary reference to Churchill's decisions and psyche at that time. He was impatient and diverted materiel away from vital offences to fruitless ones. He refused to see allied efforts as a worldwide offensive and instead viewed it as a series of theatres. He was headstrong, single-minded, obstinate and arrogant.