Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his
mastery of historical and biographical description.” Nowhere is
that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries (1937).
Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister,
these brilliant portraits of the giants of his age offer wisdom
for our own. This brand-new illustrated edition of Great
Contemporaries profiles towering figures ranging from Franklin
Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia, and Leon Trotsky to
Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and George
Bernard Shaw. With his keen powers of observation and knack for
the telling anecdote, Churchill not only traces the character of
his subjects but also puts his finger on what makes a man great.
To be sure, not all the figures profiled here are equally great,
and Churchill finds their limitations at least as revealing as
their merits. This handsome new edition of Great
Contemporaries—the first in twenty years—includes five bonus
essays that have never appeared in