Great Contemporaries: Churchill Reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin, Balfour, and Other Giants

Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the strength of “his mastery of historical and biographical description.” Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries(1937), which features Churchill’s brief lives of those he called “Great Men of our age.”

 

ISI Books is proud to publish a brand-new, illustrated edition of this neglected classic. 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. This edition—the first in twenty years—includes five essays that have never appeared in any previous version, some thirty black-and-white photographs, and an enlightening introduction and annotations by noted Churchill scholar James W. Muller.

 

Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, the essays in Great Contemporaries focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege. Churchill’s keen observations take on new importance in our own age of roiling political change.

 

Ultimately, Great Contemporaries provides fascinating insight into the statesman’s perspective. Churchill’s objective is clear: he tries to learn from these giants what makes a man great. He approaches his subjects with a measuring eye, finding their limitations at least as revealing as their merits.

 

This handsome new edition of Great Contemporaries brings back Churchill’s unmatched insights and unforgettable prose for a new generation of readers and leaders.