A compact selection drawn from Churchill’s Thoughts and Adventures and Great Contemporaries, bringing together memoir, portraiture and observation.

It shifts between remembered incidents from Churchill’s own life, and sketches of the people and events around him. It emphasises the personality of him, and how he revealed himself under pressure. 

There is a particularly vivid first-person quality to the autobiographical material. In “In the Air,” for example, Churchill recounts an early aviation accident with the vivid mixture of physical detail, self-dramatisation and humour that characterises much of his prose. Elsewhere the book turns outward to contemporaries and historical figures, making this a useful small anthology of Churchill as essayist rather than merely statesman.

Selected by Andrew Scotland and produced as a mid-century educational edition, with illustrated material throughout.

F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne / Ginn and Company, London, 1965. Hardcover with illustrated boards. First edition of this selection. Moderate rubbing and shelf wear to boards, with bumped and worn corners and a small chip/tear at the upper front corner. Internally clean and firmly bound; pages lightly aged. Good condition.