Churchill, who excelled in the study of history as a child and whose
mother was an
American, had a firm belief in a so-called "
Special Relationship" between the people of Britain and its
Commonwealth (
Australia,
Canada,
New Zealand, etc.) united under the Crown, and the people of the United States who had broken with the Crown and gone their own way. His book thus dealt with the resulting two divisions of the "English-speaking peoples". At the independent suggestions of British publisher
Newman Flower and American editor
Maxwell Perkins, Churchill began the history in the 1930s, during the period that his official biographer
Martin Gilbert termed the "wilderness years" when he was not in government. Work was interrupted in 1939 when the
Second World War broke out and Churchill was appointed
First Lord of the Admiralty and became
Prime Minister a year later. After the war ended in 1945, Churchill was busy, first writing his
history of that conflict and then as Prime Minister again between 1951 and 1955, so it was not until the mid-1950s, when Churchill was in his early eighties, that he was able to finish his work. One third of the last volume was devoted to the military minutiae of the
American Civil War.
Social history, the
agricultural revolution, and the
Industrial Revolution hardly get a mention. Political opponent
Clement Attlee suggested the work should have been titled "Things in history that interested me." Despite these criticisms, the books were bestsellers and reviewed favourably on both sides of the Atlantic. In
The Daily Telegraph,
J. H. Plumb wrote: "This history will endure; not only because Sir Winston has written it, but also because of its own inherent virtues — its narrative power, its fine judgment of war and politics, of soldiers and statesmen, and even more because it reflects a tradition of what Englishmen in the hey-day of their empire thought and felt about their country's past." ==See also==