Here is one of the great books of our age, Winston Churchill's most ambitious work and the crowning achievement of his career. An authoritative survey of the history of English-speaking peoples throughout the world combines intriguing, closely observed biographical profiles—of Alfred the Great, Victoria, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, and other notables—with an account of the key events and issues of the era. This final of Churchill's great, multi-volume works spawned many single-volume spinoffs in the form of excerpted works that have become collectible in their own right. In his preface he remarks that the book 'slumbered peacefully', until 1956, 'when things had quietened down'.

I had enjoyed Churchill's war memoirs, so I thought this could be a good choice --at least as far as readability was concerned. The events of the Second World War, the major interruption in the writing process, had reconfirmed his belief in the "special relationship", the shared heritage and destiny of Britain and the United States. You get the idea, reading an unfamiliar word, it not making sense in the context of the sentence, then stopping to look it up and re-read the sentence. S. Congress on 26 December 1941 he famously quipped, "I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own.

Consequently he gave considerable attention to the key events of American history: around a quarter of the third volume, The Age of Revolution, is dedicated to the War of Independence, and a full third of the final volume, The Great Democracies, contains a detailed study of the American Civil War. How the Parlament came to be, the back and forth of powerful earls and lords the resulting wars occurring, both civil and abroad.

Condition of the set is better than near fine, the contents immaculate, the lovely bindings bright and clean with only trivial scuffs and blemishes.Reading reports of the last decade of his life, one is struck by the central interest this history represented in his final years, and how rapidly he sank into decline and depression after the final volume was published. The teeter-totter of Palmerston and Disraeli I found to be anti-climatic, as was much of the last 150 years, to paraphrase a different era and battle, 2 bald men fighting over a comb. Despite these criticisms, the books were bestsellers and reviewed favourably on both sides of the Atlantic. I had heard of the Wars of the Roses, so named because the two Houses of the Plantagenet Dynasties fought among themselves for 30 years, determining what historian is quoted. After reading this book, you can't help but wonder what kind of people deserve such a leader- the kind of leader who is relentlessly pragmatic, ruthlessly indifferent to human conditions and yet charismatic enough to save an empire from the cusp of an apocalyptic destruction.