The popular image of Winston Churchill – grandson of a duke, drinking champagne and smoking a cigar – conjures up a man of wealth and substance. The reality is that Britain’s most celebrated modern statesman lived for most of his life on a financial cliff-edge.
Only fragments of information about Churchill’s finances, or their impact on his public life, have previously emerged. With the help of unprecedented access to Churchill’s private records, David Lough has created the first fully researched narrative of Churchill’s private finances and business affairs. As he reveals the scale of Churchill’s financial risk-taking, combined with an ability to talk or write himself out of the tightest of corners, the links between the private man and the public figure become clear.
The most original – and surprising – book about Churchill to appear for many years, No More Champagne shines new and revelatory light on a twentieth-century British icon.