Talk:Bibliography of Winston Churchill

Needed bibliography

There are thousands of books and articles on Wikipedia and our users will waste a lot of time sorting through the listings in Google Scholar---which gives 180,000 titles. So this is a compilation of the most useful titles esp those selected by Wikipedia editors for the various Wikipedia articles on Churchill. Rjensen (talk) 12:55, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

This is useful. A load of books got deleted from the main article lately. I'm sure it can be added to.Paulturtle (talk) 22:46, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Copyright Status

Churchill died in 1965 so one would expect his works to enter the public domain in Britain on 1 January 2036, but from the included links it appears copyright on many of these books has already expired in the United States. Some book-by-book clarification wouldn't go amiss. Robin S. Taylor (talk) 22:17, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Charmley

Not particularly looking to start an argument here, but it's worth being aware that the John Charmley 1993 biog is actually a serious heavyweight academic biography - not some piece of fringe nonsense. It attracted a certain amount of attention when it came out because of a silly review by Alan Clark who argued that Britain should have made peace with Hitler in 1940 (as I recall). Paulturtle (talk) 05:01, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I was influenced by the negative reviews, such as Noel Annan, Daedalus (1993, Vol. 122 Issue 3) "Charmley's 1993 revisionist work is a product of Britain's current socially and politically pessimistic climate. Many of Charmley's criticisms of Churchill are justifiable, though questionably derived and therefore vague." Louis Rubin is pretty critical: "John Charmley, in a revisionist biography whose 649 pages of text and 52 pages of double-columned notes belie the fact that it is in inception and execution a partisan tract, with an animus against its subject that will grant him absolutely nothing. The Winston Churchill of this volume is an almost unmitigated disaster to his country. To find this book's counterpart one must turn to the debunking biographies of the 1920's, or Lytton Strachey on Cardinal Manning, or John T. Flynn on F.D.R., or perhaps H.L. Mencken on Woodrow Wilson" ["Did Churchill Ruin "The Great Work of Time"? Thoughts on the New British Revisionism." Virginia Quarterly Review ( Winter 1994)]. Susan Walker 's review calls it "seriously flawed." ( International Affairs. April 1994). Anthony Seldon is also very harsh: "many of Charmley's are political, not historical judgments (such as the desirability of Churchill seeking a 1941 accord with Hitler). Charmley bowls in with 1980s and 1990s, right of centre, revisionist judgments on how Churchill and the world could have been different and better in the 1940s. He assumes a freedom of choice which was simply not on the menu. This is not just bad politics. It is bad history." [Political Studies March 1995] Rjensen (talk) 05:34, 1 February 2024 (UTC)