CHURCHILL, The Rt. Hon. Winston S.

Great Contemporaries

London, Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1937 (first edition, first impression).

Octavo, 335 pages plus a portrait plate for each of the 21 biographical subjects.

Blue cloth lettered in gilt on the spine and front cover, with the publisher's blindstamp front and rear; top edge dyed blue; leading edge lightly marked; two tiny light marks to the rear cover, with one rear corner lightly bumped; a near-fine copy with the price-clipped first impression dustwrapper a little creased, chipped and torn.

'These biographical essays on twenty-one Great Men of this eventful age cover a wide and varied field, but they illustrate from different standpoints the main story of the fortunes of Great Britain and Europe as we have known them. In nearly all cases Mr. Churchill writes from friendship or acquaintance with the personalities he describes.

His comments upon the leading statesmen and soldiers are based on profound and intimate understanding gained over many years of Parliamentary life, or of contact with the armies. In their sequence they are thus the stepping-stones of historical narrative in a flow of personal reminiscence' (dustwrapper blurb).

The Earl of Rosebery, King George V, the ex-Kaiser, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Chamberlain, Lawrence of Arabia, Leon Trotsky, and Adolf Hitler are just some of Churchill's contemporaries discussed in these essays 'written by me at intervals during the last eight years'. His essay on Hitler was written in 1935: 'We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation and brought it back serene, helpful and strong, to the forefront of the European family circle. It is on this mystery of the future that history will pronounce'.

Woods/ICS A43(a.1); Langworth, page 178 (recording 5000 copies of this first impression, and noting the discrepancy between reported dates of publication of the first six impressions, with both September and October being mooted for the first one).