A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

In broad principle I shall be willing to undertake to write “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples”, their origins, their quarrels, their misfortunes and their reconciliation for the sum of £20,000,’ wrote Winston Churchill to Newman Flower, the managing director of Cassell & Co, on October 30th, 1932. The project would take four or five years, he expected. Yet because of the great events that overtook not only Churchill but also the English-speaking peoples themselves, this four-volume work (The Birth of Britain, The New World, The Age of Revolution and The Great Democracies), comprising almost 1,500 pages, was not published for another quarter of a century.