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More than any other book by Winston Churchill, the wide-ranging Thoughts and Adventures allows the contemporary reader to grasp the extraordinary variety and depth of Churchill’s mature thoughts on the questions, both grave and gay, facing modern man.
Churchill begins by asking what it would be like to live your life over again and ends by describing his love affair with painting. In between, he touches on subjects as diverse as spies, cartoons, submarines, elections, flying, and the future. Reading these essays — originally dictated late at night in the 1920s in his study, and by which he was able to support his family and live like a lord without inherited wealth — is like being invited to dinner at Churchill’s country seat at Chartwell, where the soup was limpid, Pol Roger Champagne flowed, the pudding had a theme, and Churchill entertained lucky visitors with vivid conversation. This ISI Books edition, with a new introduction and notes by James W. Muller, Academic Chairman of the Churchill Centre, recovers Churchill’s unforgettable table talk for a new generation of readers.
What They're Saying...
"Here in this volume a new generation of readers will be exposed to this remarkable man who, though far from infallible or bereft of blind spots, nonetheless strides across our age like legend out of antiquity."
— Paul Cella The New Ledger
Interview with James Muller , editor of
Thoughts and Adventures
Didn’t the book once have another title?
Churchill considered various titles for the book, which was originally published in Britain as Thoughts and Adventures but simultaneously in America under the title Amid These Storms.
Was Thoughts and Adventures ghostwritten?
No, though he had help in writing it from literary assistants and expert advisers, Churchill was one of the statesmen of the twentieth century who actually wrote his own material, and to a very high standard: he later won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He did not, however, take time to write the preface to Thoughts and Adventures himself: we have his note of thanks to his secretary Eddie Marsh, congratulating him for counterfeiting his own style so well that no one would know the difference.
Is Thoughts and Adventures one of Churchill’s most famous books?
No, it is certainly one of his least-known and most neglected books, despite its obvious and enduring appeal. Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert takes little note of it in his official biography. Biographers have plumbed it for stories about Churchill, but few scholars have paid much attention to it as a book..
Isn’t Thoughts and Adventures just a disconnected shuffle of essays, without any real unity or organization?
Some such charge about this book would probably be made by social science professors and academicians who are inveterate systematizers, but in fact the lack of system in Thoughts and Adventures reflects real life and provides a better introduction to practical politics than the artificial system these scholars favor.
I already have a copy of Thoughts and Adventures—why should I buy this new ISI Press edition of the book?
The new edition, has been carefully edited and has a new introduction exploring the significance of the book; scores of new footnotes identifying people and events; and a new, improved index that offers a better guide to Churchill’s topics than ever before. There are even new illustrations to enhance the reader’s experience. This is the one indispensable edition of Thoughts and Adventures, the best one ever published.
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