If I could change places with anyone in history, I’d be strongly tempted to choose Winston Churchill, if for no other reason that he made such a huge difference in winning WWII. (Readers: feel free to name who you’d change places with.)
The finest biography of Churchill that I’ve read—indeed, the best biography of any sort I’ve ever read—is William Manchester’s two-volume classic The Last Lion. It was a great tragedy, and really frustrating, that Manchester died before producing the last and most exciting volume: Manchester’s narrative ends right as Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940.
But Churchill lovers rejoice—the lacuna is filled. The latest New York Review of Books (via reviewer Brian Urquart) gives huge encomiums to Max Hastings’s new biography:
Hastings’s Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945 is a magnificent achievement. After the vast number of works on Churchill that have appeared in the last sixty-five years, one could be forgiven for thinking that everything significant must already have been said, but Winston’s War is something fresh and different. Churchill’s inspired leadership and the unique strength of his will saved Britain from defeat and occupation and did much to make the ultimately victorious alliance possible. Hastings’s wealth of research, quotation, anecdote, and comment builds up a living picture of the genius, as well as of the heroic flaws, of this immensely gifted and fascinating human being.
I heard Hastings give a nice talk on this book at the Hay Festival, and I’ll be getting it for sure. (Amazon’s asking $23 for the hardback.)
I’m pretty sure I could do more positive for the world by switching with Hitler than Churchill, so that would be my choice.
ff the top of my head, I’d trade places with Claus von Stauffenberg and place that satchel just a little bit to the right.
Or the switchboard operator at Wolf’s Lair that day, and delay the call that came thru to vS, to give him enough time to arm the second fuse.
I was really disappointed by Manchester’s death [as I assume was he !] and apparently no one to take up the task of completing “The Last Lion” … hopefully, this will help fill the void. I too will definitely be buying and reaading this one !
Personally I am a fan of Neville Chamberlain – but then I find characters whose lives have high points but end in failure attractive. I know he was guilty of naivity in thinking that Mr Hitler would be as good as his word, but he was a very humane man & an he tried to prevent a war that he knew would be disasterous for Britain. Don’t know who I would swap with – Wat Tyler perhaps? I never did like Richard II – a smug git who, at the end of the Peasant’s Revolt (1381) said, “serfs you are & serfs you shall remain”.
Mark Twain, because he had such fun and gave so much enjoyment to others.
Good news! The final volume of The Last Lion is being completed from Manchester’s notes and intereviews. It’s due to be released in 2011. Let’s hope that it retains the quality of the first two without Manchester’s hand at the pen.
http://richardlangworth.com/2009/03/the-last-lion-volume-iii/
Wishing does make it so … neat !
who is doing it ?
I’d be very careful about any book written by Max Hastings. He’s not a historian (indeed, he doesn’t have a degree in anything) and is a journalist by training. He’s spend much of his career as a journalist with middle brow publications like the Daily Telegraph. In an era when we can reasonable expect and want popular historians to hold a PhD in the subject, I can only preach caution about the quality of history he rights. It may not be factually wrong, but he doesn’t have the education to handle history.
“I’d be very careful about any book written by Max Hastings. He’s not a historian (indeed, he doesn’t have a degree in anything) and is a journalist by training.”
Sounds like Churchill himself.
Easy. Fred Astaire.
I’d be willing to do a very short, simple exchange with Gregor Mendel. Just long enough to take a copy of his paper on genetics and set it on the desk of Charles Darwin. I wonder how much more advanced science would be with that simple head start.
Teddy “Class Traitor” Roosevelt.
Bill Stephenson (Intrepid) a Canadian millionaire industrialist who almost single-handedly set up the British Secret Intelligence Service during WWII.
Worked closely with Col Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS:
“Stephenson and Donovan carried out the single outstanding intelligence coup of the Second World War when they delayed the Nazi invasion of Russia” Winston Churchill.
Full details in ‘A Man Called Intrepid” William (Bill) Stevenson.
I wouldn’t want to change places with any specific person, for obvious reasons. (I’m not he or she.)
But I may consider trading places with the Last Man, just for curiosity’s sake. Will our descendants eventually go extinct, and in that case how?
I’d be Emperor Julian (the apostate) and I would take care of business at home rather than getting myself killed on unnecessary military adventures. Imagine a world in which christianity was not the path to power in ancient Rome….
Well, heroes differ, depending on who you are. I guess to many of us (Americans) and Brits (maybe some other allies) he was a hero b/c of WWII. For Indians and Arabs, he was a racist prick not much better than Hitler insofar as his views about the lesser races were concerned (remember his famous quote about reserving the right to use poison gas against the “uncivilized”; and the other one that went: “I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.”)
He was a ‘man of his time’, but where would the world be now if no-one had strayed out of their own back yard?
Since my grandmother was beaten by Churchill’s anti-union thugs in the General Strike of 1926- he had suggested using machine guns against them- I don’t think I wolud want to be him, no.
As far as India went, Churchill was not a “man of his time”. He was a man of the previous century, doing everything possible to prevent the spread of democracy and independence to the “lesser breeds”.
He does deserve all the praise he gets for his role in WWII-bearing in mind he was put in place at the insistence of the Labour Party against the wishes of the majority of Conservative appeasers, something modern right-wingers find easy to forget.