Mirrors of Greatness

David Reynolds is the award-winning and bestselling author of twelve history books and Professor of International History at Cambridge University (Christ's College). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. His book awards include the Wolfson Prize and the PEN Hessell Tiltman prize. David has written and presented critically acclaimed films and documentaries for both BBC TV and Radio 4.

A TELEGRAPH BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023

'This book, by a Cambridge academic who has studied his subject over a lifetime perhaps more closely and shrewdly than any other writer, is not a collection of Churchill's biggest clangers. Instead, it is almost a second volume that Churchill himself never wrote, of his 1937 Great Contemporaries...always shrewd and sometimes brilliant...It includes wonderful anecdotes, some unfamiliar. Even the stories that we know bear retelling'

The Times, Max Hastings

'A brilliant new portrait of the man who is, for many, still the Greatest Briton ... wonderfully illuminating'

Daily Mail

'A highly imaginative and thought-provoking way of exploring the personality of a man who, like him or loathe him, left an indelible mark on our age'

Adam Zamoyski

'Winston Churchill was unique-but that does not mean that he was alone. David Reynolds' insightful work illuminates much about those towering figures who shaped not only the politics of the first half of the twentieth century, but also helped form the man who was, in the end, the greatest of them all'

Eliot A. Cohen, author of The Hollow Crown

'Erudite. Authoritative. Compellingly written, and with pace and verve. Reynolds reveals much that is new in a gripping narrative history of the Great Man, one that will have you turning the pages into the early hours. It certainly did me. Like all good books, I shall return to this again and again'

Damien Lewis

'Who inspired Churchill as he rose to the pinnacle of power? And how did he himself seek to mold how history would view him? No one is better placed to address these deceptively simple questions than David Reynolds, and he succeeds splendidly in this magnificent book'

Fredrik Logevall, author of JFK