Paul Bew has achieved the near impossible: he has somehow written a book on an important aspect of Winston Churchill’s statecraft that is totally comprehensive, genuinely ground-breaking and yet capable of being read in an afternoon. In a life that has been trawled over literally thousands of times by historians, Churchill’s relations with Ireland have not received anything like the attention they deserve, despite the significant role he played in Irish history and Ireland’s equally significant role in his own career. That historiographical gap has now been definitively filled by Bew’s scholarly, highly readable and fascinating book.

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