Piers Brendon
Never Was So Much Owed…
No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money
By David Lough
Head of Zeus 532pp £25 order from our bookshop
If the revelations contained in this book about Winston Churchill’s personal finances had been common knowledge in 1940, he might not have become prime minister. For what David Lough shows in compelling detail is that the political risk-taker, who had notoriously described the disastrous Dardanelles expedition as ‘a legitimate war gamble’, was even more reckless in private than he was in his public life. No one who had been so irresponsible with his own fortune, it would surely have been said, should be entrusted with the fortunes of the nation. Luckily for the nation, its saviour kept his serial improvidence under wraps.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2