Mirrors of Greatness

Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him

By: David Reynolds

Narrated by: Ethan Kelly

A new biography of Winston Churchill, revealing how his relationships with the other great figures of his age shaped his own triumphs and failures as a leader

Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. In Mirrors of Greatness, prizewinning historian David Reynolds reevaluates Churchill’s life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill’s lifelong struggle to overcome his political failures and his evolving grasp of what “greatness” truly entailed.

Through his dealings with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, we follow Churchill’s triumphant campaign against Nazi Germany. But we also see a Churchill whose misjudgments of allies and rivals like Roosevelt, Stalin, Gandhi, and Clement Attlee blinded him to the British Empire’s waning dominance on the world stage and to the rising popularity of a postimperial, socialist vision of Great Britain at home.

Magisterial and incisive, Mirrors of Greatness affords Churchill his due as a figure of world-historical importance and deepens our understanding of his legend by uncovering the ways his greatest contemporaries helped make him the man he was, for good and for ill.

©2024 David Reynolds (P)2024 Basic Books

Great Book…horrendous performance

I loved the entire book and the way it was written . My only complaint was the performance. Is there anyone else who could mispronounce names and places even more? He’s not familiar with French or German pronunciation and this is a problem. Hope professor Reynolds didn’t pay too much.

Illumination of Churchill by seeing him with and through those figures who impacted him most.

Starts slow with Churchill early years but becomes progressively more engaging. More interesting to me than a traditional chronological biography, even though it follows the chapters of his life.

Fantastic Content Dreadful Pronunciation

David Reynolds is a fantastic historian. All his work is erudite and scholarly. This is no different.

But the narrator spoils it. His pronunciation is is awful. The British politician Lord Cadogan he pronounced Cad-oh-Gan! Anything vaguely French is mangled to a mess. Gloire became global.

A disappointment to say the least

Churchill observations

the telling oh history from a Churchill perspective. a very interesting review of world history.

A markedly socialist view of the era and of Churchill’s character and achievements.

The book covers Churchill’s entire life. One gets a good broad view of Britain in its zenith and decline. It is the author’s inability to tell a good story without inserting biased praise of socialism and anyone who subscribed to it that distracts from an otherwise quite good summary of this important span of history.