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History, Politics & Rhetoric
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Praise for "Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness"
"Richard Toye's double biography of Lloyd George and Churchill has caught readers' imagination."
- Michael Gove, The Times, 22 May 2007
"[A]dmirably nuanced and just"
- Max Hastings, The Sunday Times, 18 March 2007
"[E]xhaustive and scholarly [...] Toye has deployed an astonishingly wide range of sources [...] His book is a mine of fascinating material which will be unfamiliar even to readers who think they know their Lloyd George and Churchill pretty well. "
- John Campbell, The Sunday Telegraph, 15 April 2007
"Toye has written a fine and nuanced study of a volatile relationship."
- A.W. Purdue, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 18 May 2007
1 comment:
Mr. Toye, I just discovered your blog and I use it as an opportunity to address you a question that ganwed at my mind since I read the NYT review of "Churchill's Empire." The reviewer's angle to your book is to ask how can the two Churchill be reconciled? How the imperialist, racist Churchill can be compatible with the Nazi-fighting, defender of democracy? His answer is weak: Churchill may have been a thug but he recognized a greater thug when he saw one.
I'm wondering if you would agree with my that maybe the answer to this question can be found in Mark Mazower's Dark Continent, in which he proposes that Hilter's mistake, the one that prompted Churchill to seek alliance with Stalin and to maintain his alliance with the USA despite Roosevelt's lecture on freedom for the people from the oppression of colonization, was to use against Europeans some of the methods that were used against colonized people, methods that Churchill himself used only because of his very racist and imperialist ideology? In other words, Churchill recognized Hitler as a "greater thug" because Hitler did to Europeans what Churchill himself had done to Black or Asian people. And to do this against "Negroes" was fine by Churchill's standards but against Jews (which he must have considered as European and not as outsiders as Saül Friedländer explained in his books) was Hitler's greatest mistake, a mistake that provoked the Alliance of such antinomian States as the UK the USA and the USSR against him.
What do you think?
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