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Great Contemporaries
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Additional information
| Publisher | Simon Publications, Reprint edition (19 Dec. 1942) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 296 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1931313709 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1931313704 |
| Dimensions | 16.46 x 1.93 x 23.16 cm |
by Frank Hotchkiss
Book arrived as ordered.
by Sara
Gift, perfect present
by Number13
`Great Contemporaries’ is a fascinating, informative and enjoyable series of 22 “essays on Great Men of our age” which Churchill wrote during the 1930s. To read them is to hear that unforgettable voice describing to you the people he knew and the critical events of three decades.
The majority of the subjects were political or military figures of the preceding thirty years, sometimes friends and colleagues, sometimes parliamentary opponents, and the book sparkles with personal insights gained from life both in Westminster and on the Western Front.
As the various anniversaries of events in the 1914-18 war are approaching, this book is also an excellent, concise briefing on many of the British and French leaders with whom Churchill served: Asquith, Balfour, Haig, French and Fisher for Britain, Clemenceau and Foch for France. Naturally, his profiles of the Kaiser and Hindenburg were written from (to say the least) a greater distance.
This is a diverse collection; among others encountered are George Bernard Shaw, Parnell, Philip Snowden, King George V, Lawrence of Arabia, Baden-Powell and, viewed from 1935 with the prescience that most people at that time still chose to ignore, Hitler.
The most personal contribution is the essay on his great friend Frederick `F.E.’ Smith. The opening line illustrates one of the great strengths of this collection; written for busy readers of newspapers, each essay seizes your attention and holds it. “A hundred years ago, Thomas Smith was the best runner and the most redoubtable knuckle-fighter in the West Riding of Yorkshire.” After such an introduction, could any reader not wish to read on and discover how his great-grandson “became Lord Chancellor of England.”?
This edition is a reprint of that of 1942, which extended but rarely altered the original 1937 collection. Churchill assumed his original readers would be aware of the major issues of the day and so does not reiterate every detail of each referenced fact or person. However, with his explanation and analysis of significant events in the lives he is describing, and the many interactions between the “Great Contemporaries”, it is not difficult to absorb the political intrigues of a century ago through the prose and the almost spoken presence of the very greatest of their contemporaries.
by Rowan Lock
In this review I have nothing bad to say about Churchill’s writing, my complaints are about this publishers decision to cover at least half of every other page with legions of patronising annotations by a ‘Churchill scholar’ which pompously relate such rarefied and fascinating information as ‘Karl Marx was a German political theorist, economist and philosopher who advocated Communism’ (this in articles about Shaw and Trotsky!) and ‘Joan of Arch was a French peasant girl who led the French army’. Not only is this information often unnecessary and sometimes irrelevant (the before mentioned note on Joan of Arch precedes to give a brief biography of her and a summary of the Hundred Years war) it also just looks terrible to turn the page and see another two attack formations of notes forcing the text up onto the top of the page. And by every page I mean every page, because Churchill constantly makes references all the time, which Muller proceeds to hunt down and pin down one after the other in what can only be an attempt at showing off.
Honestly, some respect for the readers intelligence might be expected considering how rare these essays are.
by James W. Muller
The new ISI Books edition of this book, Winston S. Churchill’s “Great Contemporaries,” edited by James W. Muller with Paul H. Courtenay and Erica L. Chenoweth, ISBN 1935191993, will indeed be published (in paperback only) in May 2012, with a new introduction, five additional essays by Churchill (on H. G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin, Kitchener of Khartoum, King Edward VIII, and Rudyard Kipling) that have never before appeared in the book, and more than a thousand new editorial footnotes identifying people, places, events, and references, as well as extensive endnotes describing other published versions of Churchill’s essays.
The new ISI Books edition will be the definitive edition of “Great Contemporaries,” a companion volume to the new edition of Churchill’s “Thoughts and Adventures” published in 2009 by ISI Books, and every Churchill reader will want to have a copy.
by Just William
You can almost hear Winston dictating and his foresight is amazing
by Gilbert Michaud
yes new footnotes by paul h courtenay and text by muller . they added five new portraits to the already extended edition . first publisherd in 1937 . so fine great text . i just dony like that sick yellow color of ISI BOOKS ..
by George Hope
Well worth reading if only for the political comment which is often highly relevant for today.