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Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (2017)

par Thomas E. Ricks

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5471843,718 (3.85)16
Biography & Autobiography. History. Politics. Nonfiction. HTML:A New York Times bestseller!
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017
A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike.

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's??Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. In a crucial moment, they responded first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscations, and then they acted on their beliefs. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the West's compass set toward freedom as its due north.
It's not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930's, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini "men we could do business with," if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom??that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted.
In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their age's necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940's to triumph over freedom's enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwell's reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Ricks's masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin.
Churchill and Orwell is a perfect gift for the holi
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Affichage de 1-5 de 17 (suivant | tout afficher)
A fantastic dual biography that traces the disparate paths taken to a common anti-totalitarianism by these giants of the twentieth century, and also their reputations after death.

From the mid-1920s onward, aristocratic politician and writer Winston Churchill was a right-wing democratic capitalist. During the same period, little-known novelist and journalist George Orwell was a left-wing democratic socialist. Before, during, and after World War II, both Englishmen were convinced of the wrongs of Hitler's Nazism and Stalin's communism, and both fought them in their own ways through words and deeds.

For an earlier take on this topic, see The Two Winstons, the final episode of Simon Schama's great documentary, A History of Britain. ( )
  bibliothecarivs | Feb 12, 2024 |
A particularly timely book in 2018, and worthy of the fulsome praise it garners.
  Mark_Feltskog | Dec 23, 2023 |
Almost finished June 2023! This is a good book because it also carries the past forward to the present. And the recurrence of change and similar issues in a time of uncertainty and fear about who will prevail and succeed and who won’t!
  njkost | Jun 15, 2023 |
An outstanding biography of these two men who one would have considered as very different, but the author shows how on matters of importance how similar they were: In particular The ability to understand the issues of the day and how to fight for the individual and liberty. ( )
  mumoftheanimals | Feb 1, 2023 |
Writing a biography of two different people in the same book seems like a hard thing to do, but Thomas Ricks pulls it off in Churchill and Orwell:the Fight for Freedom. Both men were against totalitarianism and both were influential. While Churchill was more famous during his lifetime the legacy of Orwell's books may last longer. Both Churchill and Orwell almost died before their greatest accomplishments. Churchill was hit by a car while crossing a street in New York and spent weeks in the hospital with multiple broken bones. He looked to the right(which would have worked in England) and stepped in front of a car coming from the left. Orwell was shot through the neck while fighting in with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. The bullet missed his spine and his arteries by millimeters and he lived to write his greatest works.

Both men were persistent. Churchill encouraged England to fight when many of his Party wanted to surrender to the Nazis. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, never gave up when his writing career when sales were few and publishers reluctant. Both fought for the freedom of the individual against totalitarianism. Both were ahead of their peers is seeing reality. ( )
  MMc009 | Jan 30, 2022 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 17 (suivant | tout afficher)
According to Ricks, both Winston Churchill and George Orwell lived through World War II and had a shared outlook on the war. "At a time not unlike today — when people were wondering whether democracy was sustainable, when a lot of people thought you needed authoritarian rule, either from the right or the left — Orwell and Churchill, from their very different perspectives, come together on a key point: We don't have to have authoritarian government."
 
both men’s “dominant priority, a commitment to human freedom, gave them common cause”. They didn’t need any personal interaction to be kindred spirits in the struggles against Hitler’s Nazism and Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism. “They responded with the same tools — their intellects, their confidence in their own judgements even when those judgements were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words. And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.”
ajouté par danielx | modifierEvening Standard (May 25, 2017)
 
Churchill and Orwell never met, Ricks writes separate biographies and then works hard to deliver a common theme. He succeeds because these two men made cases for individual freedom better than anyone in their century.
ajouté par danielx | modifierKirkus Reviews (May 23, 2017)
 
Only after war broke out in 1939 did Churchill and Orwell find common cause, seeing the conflict in similar terms even if they did not work together. For Churchill, this was a war “to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.” For Orwell, “If this war is about anything at all, it is a war in favor of freedom of thought.”
ajouté par danielx | modifierNew York Times, Richard Aldous (May 23, 2017)
 
These two were pillars of the 20th century struggle against “the twin totalitarian threats of fascism and communism,” Ricks argues. “Churchill’s flamboyant extroversion, his skills with speech, and the urgency of a desperate wartime defense led him to a communal triumph that did much to shape our world today. Orwell’s increasingly phlegmatic and introverted personality, combined with a fierce idealism and a devotion to accuracy in writing, brought him as a writer to fight to protect a private place in that modern world.” Both men shared this unshakable belief: that their audience deserved the truth
 
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On December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party's government, stepped out of a taxi on New York's Fifth Avenue.
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Biography & Autobiography. History. Politics. Nonfiction. HTML:A New York Times bestseller!
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017
A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike.

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's??Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. In a crucial moment, they responded first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscations, and then they acted on their beliefs. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the West's compass set toward freedom as its due north.
It's not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930's, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini "men we could do business with," if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom??that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted.
In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their age's necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940's to triumph over freedom's enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwell's reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Ricks's masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin.
Churchill and Orwell is a perfect gift for the holi

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