The Churchill Series - May 24, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

At a dinner party a while back someone asked, “John, what books did Churchill read?”

Well, you don’t really try to answer such a question, do you?

A polite response with a little information is all that’s called for, and others will carry on.

I responded something like this:

Well, when he was 13 he asked his mother to buy him a copy of U. S. Grant’s Memoirs.

When he was in India in his early twenties, he read many of the classics, including Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

During WW II he readHuckleberry Finn.

And late in Churchill’s life his physician, Lord Moran, found him in bed reading Orwell’s 1984. Churchill told Moran it was his second reading.

One last thing: After the war, Churchill developed a small but very good racing stable. So he would often use thoroughbred stud books, although I don’t know that anything he learned in them ever appeared in his speeches.

Do you know of a book Churchill read that you’d like to call to our attention? How about a reference he later made to a book he'd read?

If I get enough responses, I’ll put a post together.