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Arthur Herman

Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age Hardcover – April 29, 2008

by Arthur Herman (Author)

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In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, bestselling historian Arthur Herman sheds new light on two of the most universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century, and reveals how their forty-year rivalry sealed the fate of India and the British Empire.

They were born worlds apart: Winston Churchill to Britain’s most glamorous aristocratic family, Mohandas Gandhi to a pious middle-class household in a provincial town in India. Yet Arthur Herman reveals how their lives and careers became intertwined as the twentieth century unfolded. Both men would go on to lead their nations through harrowing trials and two world wars—and become locked in a fierce contest of wills that would decide the fate of countries, continents, and ultimately an empire.

Gandhi & Churchill reveals how both men were more alike than different, and yet became bitter enemies over the future of India, a land of 250 million people with 147 languages and dialects and 15 distinct religions—the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas empire for 200 years.

Over the course of a long career, Churchill would do whatever was necessary to ensure that India remain British—including a fateful redrawing of the entire map of the Middle East and even risking his alliance with the United States during World War Two.

Mohandas Gandhi, by contrast, would dedicate his life to India’s liberation, defy death and imprisonment, and create an entirely new kind of political movement: satyagraha, or civil disobedience. His campaigns of nonviolence in defiance of Churchill and the British, including his famous Salt March, would become the blueprint not only for the independence of India but for the civil rights movement in the U.S. and struggles for freedom across the world.

Now master storyteller Arthur Herman cuts through the legends and myths about these two powerful, charismatic figures and reveals their flaws as well as their strengths. The result is a sweeping epic of empire and insurrection, war and political intrigue, with a fascinating supporting cast, including General Kitchener, Rabindranath Tagore, Franklin Roosevelt, Lord Mountbatten, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. It is also a brilliant narrative parable of two men whose great successes were always haunted by personal failure, and whose final moments of triumph were overshadowed by the loss of what they held most dear.

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736 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Bantam
Publication date

April 29, 2008
Dimensions

6.35 x 1.6 x 9.3 inches
ISBN-10

9780553804638
ISBN-13

978-0553804638
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historian Herman (How the Scots Invented the Modern World) paints a forceful portrait of the emergence of the postcolonial era in the fateful contrast—and surprising affinities—between two historic figures on opposite sides of the struggle for Indian independence. Churchill and Gandhi, both elites in their respective milieus, began their careers with remarkably similar perspectives and trod intersecting paths across India, South Africa and England. They shared an obsession with physical courage (albeit channeled in different ways) that tied conceptions of masculinity to larger ideas of racial identity and moral superiority—and India loomed large in their triumphal careers, ultimately frustrating both men's idealism. While Herman's dual biography artfully depicts the personalities of the two men, he gives short shrift to the more complex forces of British imperial decline, Indian nationalism and the emergence of the postwar order (for example, Herman helpfully but also too neatly explains the dogged centrality of India and the British raj in Churchill's worldview as an act of filial loyalty to his beloved father) But the author also takes careful account of the constellation of modern and antimodern currents of late Victorian thought in situating these vastly influential figures in a fascinating narrative of their times. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Popular historian Herman (How the Scots Invented the World, 2001) dramatizes the end of Britain’s rule of India through the lives of Mohandas Gandhi and Winston Churchill. The barrister met the politician once, in 1906, and each man’s subsequent relation to the issue of independence, up to its realization in 1947, guides Herman’s narrative. The tenor of the author’s presentation is that both Gandhi and Churchill’s visions of India’s future were illusory, and bear some blame for the convulsions of 1947 (partition, communal violence, and a Pakistani-Indian war). Rooted in his youthful experiences in India, Churchill’s stout imperialism became an ever more impractical stance as Gandhi’s advocacy of independence gained momentum over the decades. Descriptive about the latter’s revered methods of nonviolence, Herman discerns an implied forcefulness behind them should, for example, a Gandhi fast touch off riots. If uncomplimentary toward Gandhi’s political acumen, Herman presents his criticisms subtly, without impeding the brisk narrative flow. Showing history eluding Gandhi and Churchill, Herman provocatively presents their efforts to shape it. --Gilbert Taylor

Review

“Gandhi & Churchill is a powerful tale of the monumental clash between two of the giants of the twentieth century. Set against the backdrop of war and conflict, this brilliant dual biography of strong-willed visionaries locked in a struggle each believed in makes for compelling reading. Arthur Herman has written a masterful and superbly well researched account of the lives of two men who have had a profound influence on the world in which we live in today that will long stand as a testament to their legacy.”—Carlo D'Este, author of Patton: A Genius For War and Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life

“A fast-paced narrative history…Herman brings to life the twilight of the British Empire and reminds us how the twists and turns of fate helped propel these two men to their places in history. He shows us that there was more common ground between the two than most realize and that the seemingly simple tale of the imperialist and the nationalist is far more nuanced than it seems.” — Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, The Hindustan Times, Bernard Schwartz Fellow, Asia Society

"Cutting through decades of narrow or shallow reporting, Arthur Herman offers a balanced and elegant account which captures both Churchill's generosity of spirit and Gandhi's greatness of soul. While recognizing their faults, he shows what motivated them and made them great—with impressive research that in Churchill's words leaves "no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked." The last two chapters, and the author's Conclusion, are alone worth the price of what must become the standard work on the subject."—Richard M. Langworth, Editor, Finest Hour

“The rivalry between Winston Churchill and Mohandas Gandhi could hardly have been played for higher stakes. The future of British India hung upon the outcome of their 20-year struggle…. As one might expect from the author of To Rule the Waves, a fine history … Mr. Herman has researched Gandhi & Churchill meticulously and written it fluently.”—Wall Street Journal

“An amazingly interesting and perceptive presentation of these two titans of the 20th century…. I learned so much.”—Deirdre Donahue, USA Today’s book reviewer, on the NPR program “On Point”

"A forceful portrait of the emergence of the postcolonial era in the fateful contrast—and surprising affinities—between two historic figures.... Fascinating."—Publishers Weekly

“Herman's book focuses on two imposing figures who epitomized the clash …. he has probed beneath the stereotypes… [and] tells their stories stylishly and eloquently.”—Washington Post Book World

"The perfect summer book...You finish Gandhi & Churchill knowing that you can evaluate the world today, particularly modern India, with more knowledge and insight—USA Today

“Herman's storytelling style is engaging, giving new life to stories we have already heard and even forgotten…. Then there are the surprises…. Provocative, intriguing, even controversial.”—India Today

“Scruplous, compelling, and unfailingly instructive…. A detailed and richly filigreed account that introduces the Anglo-American reader to many facts and vivid if little-known personalities, both English and Indian.” –Commentary

" Brisk narrative flow.... Showing history eluding Gandhi and Churchill, Herman provocatively presents their efforts to shape it."—Booklist

“Exhaustively detailed.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

About the Author

Arthur Herman is the bestselling author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World, which has sold over 350,000 copies worldwide, and To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, which was nominated for the prestigious Mountbatten Prize in 2005. He is a former professor of history at Georgetown University, Catholic University, and the Smithsonian’s Campus on the Mall. He and his wife live in central Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The Churchills and the Raj

And Blenheim’s Tower shall triumph O’er Whitehall—anonymous pamphleteer, 1705

On November 30, 1874, another baby boy was born on the other side of the world. This one also first saw light in his grandfather’s house, but on a far grander scale—indeed, in the biggest private home in Britain.

Surrounded by three thousand acres of “green lawns and shining water, banks of laurel and fern, groves of oak and cedar, fountains and islands,” Blenheim Castle boasted 187 rooms.1 It was in a drafty bedroom on the first floor that Jennie Jerome Churchill gave birth to her first child. “Dark eyes and hair” was how her twenty-five-year-old husband, Randolph Churchill, described the boy to Jennie’s mother, and “wonderfully very pretty everybody says.”2

The child’s baptized name would be Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. If the Gandhis were unknown outside their tiny Indian state, the Churchill name was steeped in history. John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, had been Europe’s most acclaimed general and the most powerful man in Britain. His series of victories over France in the first decade of the eighteenth century had made Britain a world-class power. A grateful Queen Anne gave him the royal estate at Woodstock on which to build a palace, which he named after his most famous victory. For Winston Churchill, Blenheim Castle would always symbolize a heritage of glory and a family born to greatness.

Yet the first Duke of Marlborough had been followed by a succession of nonentities. If the power and wealth of England expanded to unimagined heights over the next century, that of the Churchills steadily declined.

The vast fortune that the first duke accumulated in the age of Queen Anne was squandered by his successors. When Randolph’s father inherited the title in 1857, the same year the Great Mutiny raged in India, he had been faced, like his father and grandfather before him, by debts of Himalayan proportions and slender means with which to meet them. Randolph’s grandfather had already turned Blenheim into a public museum, charging visitors one shilling admission. Randolph’s father would have to sell off priceless paintings (including a Raphael and Van Dyck’s splendid equestrian portrait of King Charles I, still the largest painting in the National Gallery), the fabulous Marlborough collection of gems, and the eighteen-thousand-volume Sunderland library, in order to make ends meet.3

In the financial squeeze which was beginning to affect nearly all the Victorian aristocracy, the Spencer-Churchills felt the pinch more than most. For Randolph Churchill, the Marlborough legacy was a bankrupt inheritance. In a crucial sense, it was no inheritance at all. His older brother, Lord Blandford, would take over the title, Blenheim, and the remaining estates. What was left for him, and for his heirs, was relatively paltry (although much more than the patrimony of the great majority of Britons), with £4,200 a year and the lease on a house in Mayfair.4

So the new father, twenty-five-year-old Randolph, was going to have to cut his own way into the world, just as his son would. And both would choose the same way: politics.

Randolph was the family rebel, a natural contrarian and malcontent. Beneath his pale bulging eyes, large exquisite mustache, and cool aristocratic hauteur was the soul of a headstrong alpha male. As he told his friend Lord Rosebery, “I like to be the boss.”5 Young Lord Randolph was determined to make a name for himself as a member of Parliament. All he needed was an issue.

In 1874 an issue was not easy to find. At the time when Winston Churchill was born, British politics reflected a consensus that the country had not known in nearly a hundred years—and soon would never know again.6 The last big domestic battle had been fought over the Second Reform Bill of 1867, when crowds in London clashed in the streets with police and tore up railings around Hyde Park. Passage of the act opened the door to Britain’s first working-class voters. But almost a decade later neither Conservatives nor Liberals were inclined to let it swing open any wider.

Both parties agreed that free trade was the cornerstone of the British economy, still the most productive in the world. Both agreed on the importance of keeping the gold standard. They even agreed that social reform was best left in private and local hands, although Parliament would occasionally give its approval to a round of slum clearances or a comprehensive health act. A twelve-hour day for the average workman, and ten and a half hours for women and young persons older than thirteen, made eminent good sense economically and morally. Giving them a government retirement pension or an unemployment check did not.7

Tories and Liberals also agreed on maintaining an empire that was without rival and on defending it with a navy that was second to none. In 1874 that empire was not only the most extensive but the most cohesive on the planet.8 It emcompassed Britain itself, with England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland welded together under a single government and crown. Across the Atlantic there were the islands of the West Indies and also Canada, the empire’s first self-governing “dominion”—a word that would loom large in the later battles between Churchill and Gandhi.

Then there were the prosperous and stable colonies of white settlers in New Zealand and Australia which, although more than ten thousand miles away, felt a strong bond of loyalty to Britain and the Crown. Britain also directed the fate of two colonies in southern Africa, the Cape Colony and Natal, in addition to Lagos in Nigeria. Hong Kong, Singapore, and some scattered possessions in Asia and the Mediterranean completed the collection.

But the centerpiece of the empire was India, where Britain was the undisputed master of more than a quarter billion people. In 1874 two out of every three British subjects was an Indian. Since the Mutiny both political parties had closed ranks about dealing with India. The power of the British system of governance, or the Raj as it was called after the Mutiny, had become more extensive and more streamlined. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had also made it much easier to reach the ancient subcontinent than in the days before the Mutiny.

Most Britons still knew almost nothing about the subcontinent or its peoples. Nonetheless, the fact that they possessed India, and governed it virtually as a separate empire, gave Britons a halo of superpower status that no other people or nation could match. The attitude was summed up nine years later in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Ave Imperatrix”:

And all are bred to do your will

By land and sea—wherever flies

The Flag, to fight and follow still,

And work your Empire’s destinies.

In the midst of this triumphant march to the future, the only hint of trouble was Ireland. The question of whether the Catholic Irish would ever enjoy any degree of “home rule” had become a live issue in Irish politics. In 1875 it sent Charles Stewart Parnell to Parliament, but otherwise Irish nationalism hardly registered in Westminster; nor did any other issue.*

There seemed to be no burning questions to divide public opinion, no bitter clash of interests, no looming threats on the horizon for an unknown but ambitious politician to seize on. By 1880 Randolph realized he had only one way to get attention in Parliament: by becoming a nuisance and stirring things up.

The issue Winston’s father seized upon was the Bradlaugh case. Charles Bradlaugh was a Liberal and a radical atheist who, when elected to Parliament that year, refused to take the oath of allegiance needed to take his seat in the Commons, because it contained the words “so help me God.” The question of whether Bradlaugh should be allowed to take his seat anyway stirred the hearts of many Conservative members, and Randolph’s friend Sir Henry Drummond Wolff asked his help against Bradlaugh.

Randolph soon discovered that Bradlaugh made an easy target.9 He was not only a free thinker but a socialist, an advocate of birth control, and even a critic of Empire. Bradlaugh was also a radical republican who denounced the monarchy and aristocrats like Randolph in heated terms.† So when Randolph made his speech on May 24, 1880, condemning Bradlaugh for his atheism, he also read aloud from one of Bradlaugh’s pamphlets calling the royal family “small German breast-beating wanderers, whose only merit is their loving hatred of one another.” He then hurled the pamphlet on the floor and stamped on it.

The House was ecstatic. “Everyone was full of it,” Jennie wrote, who

* It would be registering sooner than most realized. Ironically, Kipling’s triumphant poem was composed in 1882, after the exposure of an Irish plot to assassinate Queen Victoria, to reassure the British public. Winston Churchill’s earliest childhood memory was of wandering through Dublin’s Phoenix Park and seeing the point where the British viceroy had been murdered only a couple of years earlier.

† He would also be one of the first champions of Indian nationalism. When he died in 1891 and was buried in London’s Brookwood Cemetery, among the three thousand mourners who attended the funeral would be a young Mohandas Gandhi.

had watched the speech from the gallery, “and rushed up and congratulated me to such an extent that I felt as though I had made it.”10 Lord Randolph Churchill’s career was launched as a sensational, even outrageous, headline-grabber. Together with Wolff and another friend, Sir Henry Gorst, he formed what came to be known as the Fourth Party,* a junta of Tory mavericks who ripped into their own party leaders any time they sided with the g...

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0553804634
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam (April 29, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780553804638
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553804638
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.48 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.35 x 1.6 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,147,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #84 in Gandhi
- #1,050 in India History
- #2,213 in England History

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Arthur Herman

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Arthur Herman is the bestselling author of Freedom’s Forge, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, The Idea of Decline in Western History, To Rule the Waves, and Gandhi & Churchill, which was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Herman taught the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian’s Campus on the Mall, and he has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, George Mason University, and The University of the South at Sewanee.

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T. Grimsrud

Half of an excellent book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2010

Verified Purchase

This is an interesting book, to say the least. Arthur Herman had an excellent idea, trace the careers of two of the giants of the 20th century from the angle of how their lives intersected with each other (even though the two only met once, when they were both quite young). So, the focus of the book, as the subtitle indicates, is on India. The use of the word "destroyed" in reference to the Empire gives some indication of where Herman's sympathies lie. Though he is an American, he seems to have much regret that the British empire fell by the wayside.

For a massive, scholarly volume by a professional historian, this book reads remarkably well. Herman has a fascinating story to tell--and tell it well he indeed does. The book follows a pretty straight chronology, and even a person pretty familiar with the outline of the events will still find new information and provocative interpretive moves throughout.

Just as Herman himself clearly has a distinctive perspective that shapes how he presents this material, so readers will bring their perspectives that shape how they will respond to this book. From my perspective as one decidedly unfriendly to empires and their champions (such as Churchill), and friendly to Gandhi's pioneering work in the philosophy and practice of nonviolence, Herman comes across as a pretty unreliable witness in the Gandhi half of this double biography. Yet, even though Herman likes Churchill much better than I do, his treatment of the man is much more objective and believable than his corresponding account of Gandhi's career.

That is, I felt I learned enough about Churchill to be able to form my own judgment. Herman is thorough and clear in providing ample bases for seeing Churchill as a deeply problematic influence on the world of the 20th century--even as Herman himself generally views this influence as more positive. Churchill drank deeply of imperial grandiosity (along with other more mundane spirits) and, at the cost of untold lives, exerted every ounce of his considerable power and influence to keep the British Empire intact long after even the British people themselves believed it was time to let go. Churchill was an unrepentant racist, also with deadly consequences for India and other part of the Empire. And he was apparently the person most responsible for several terrible military disasters (most notably the infamous fiasco at Gallipoli during World War I).

To Herman's credit, we get Churchill warts and all. In fact, I am not quite sure why Herman respects Churchill so much. He certainly does not provide a persuasive case for why we should see Churchill as a great man--that seems to be Herman's assumption, one he does not really allow the evidence he has presented here (which does not show Churchill as a great man) to challenge.

Whereas with Gandhi, it's kind of the opposite problem. We do learn a great deal about many of the events of Gandhi's life--but I simply don't know how much of what Herman says about the Indian leader is to be believed. Time after time he asserts that the standard account of Gandhi's career is wrong, but almost never presents evidence to support his assertion. If he were trustworthy on Gandhi, such assertions would be quite helpful for all who want the most accurate account of one who certainly has been the object of much hagiography. But the best I can bring myself to say about Herman's Gandhi sections is that they raise provocative questions and challenge one to look more closely at the sources.

Throughout the book Herman combines two types of comments regarding Gandhi that seem deeply in tension--one is how just about every major campaign or other initiative Gandhi took was essentially a failure or at least of negligible significance (going back to the emergence of sayagraha in South Africa down to Gandhi's last days of seeking for Hindu/Muslim reconciliation); the second was how powerful and highly influential Gandhi was in India and globally. The significance for Herman of Gandhi's influence is almost always to suggest how problematic that influence was, how Gandhi bore so much responsibility when events turned bad. But how can both of these dynamics be true-Gandhi's utter ineffectiveness and Gandhi's powerful and regrettable influence? If Gandhi was always so ineffective, how did he come to have so much influence?

Part of the problem is that Herman makes no attempt whatsoever to account for Gandhi's philosophy, other than occasional disparaging comments often pointing either to Gandhi's hypocrisy or out of touch idealism. The reader of this book will learn virtually nothing about the meaning that satyagraha had for Gandhi, where it came from and how he sought to apply it. There are no reflections on Gandhi's powerful influence on various social change efforts around the world.

Here is one quote that captures a great deal of Herman's sensibility: "The confrontation [between Churchill and Gandhi] was between two different conceptions of life. One rested on secular and humanistic traditions that had been tested by history and centuries of human conflict. The other rested on a vision of spiritual purity in which history and material things (including Gandhi's own body) counted for nothing. Churchill valued human liberty as the product of struggle, as man's supreme achievement. Gandhi, by contrast, valued liberty as God's supreme achievement. It was man's duty to live up to that standard. Without it, Gandhi believed, life was meaningless, including his own" (page 507).

The idea that a racist and imperialist such as Churchill, who fought bitterly to keep India's hundreds of millions of people under the dominance of Great Britain, valued "liberty" supremely seems ludicrous. And we can ask how "humanistic" any tradition is that undergirds such racism and imperialism and that so comfortably resorts to such violations of standards of restraint in warfare as seen in the Churchill-approved saturation bombing of civilian populations in cities such as Dresden and Hamburg during World War II.

The relation between Gandhi's philosophy and practice of nonviolence and "history and material things" is a point of major debate--a debate that will be extremely difficult to resolve in part due to the incomplete evidence we have concerning where history actually is going and in part due to the importance of our assumptions in how we address such a question. However, I want to argue that in fact Gandhi's philosophy is extraordinarily important for human history, is at its core anchored in history, and is actually our best hope for on-going human existence in history.

As I mentioned above, I did find this book highly enjoyable to read. And I think Herman deserves our gratitude for taking on such an interesting and important project. In the end, though, I don't really think that what the world today needs is an exaltation of Churchillian imperialism combined with an attempted debunking of Gandhian satyagraha--rather, what we need is an account of this story that take the opposite tack in dealing with each of its main characters.

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Fuad R Qubein

Gandhi and the British Empire

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

So much ink has been spilled in writing about the independence of India and the interaction between the two great legends Gandhi and Churchill. Yet this new book by Arthur Herman adds still more details to an old and familiar story with interesting revelations. Rather than reviewing the lengthy details one should perhaps focus on a brief comparison of the two legends especially now that the dust has long settled and the fog cleared making the view clearer and more objective.

No feature is perhaps more contrasting than the backgrounds from which the two leaders emerged. Churchill came from a well known family in an upper British society. In his biography he bemoans the little attention his father gave him and the love he was deprived of, an issue which affected his adulthood. To add insult to injury, his mother was more concerned about her love affairs than about her son and saw it best to leave Winston in boarding schools for most of his childhood. By contrast, Gandhi grew up in a simple, middle class, loving family who cared much about his education to send him to Britain for his law degree. Unfortunately, he was always conscious about his backward and his impoverished people (how despicable my people are!), especially in view of the highly civilised British communities.

From the start it was clear that both men were devoted to improving the conditions and prestige of their own people. But both had serious stumbling blocks. Churchill, who was obsessed with the art of war ( '...I know how miserable it can be but I love every second of it ' ) started his career being rash and impetuous. He rushed his government into trying to save Antwerp and later, to defend the Dardanelles against the Germans, with heavy losses and failures in both. The name Churchill quickly became a bad word. As for Gandhi, contrary to general belief, he spent 75% of his career trying to improve the lot of the Indian minorities in South Africa. He tried to change the laws, to organise his people and to show them how to strike, but with little success. Frustrated, many people turned against him. At one point he was even physically attacked by his people. The government imprisoned him for inciting trouble.

What kind of rapport did these two leader have with their people? The fact is that they both had mixed results. Gandhi, back home from Africa, was much misunderstood by his native Indians. On one hand, he loved the British Empire and took pride in belonging to it. On the other, he hated its arrogance and reluctance to expedite India's independence. His own people were confused and many could not trust him. Even his political philosophy concerning non-cooperation and peaceful resistance was not well received or understood. Churchill, after his initial disasters, also had a tough time trying to regain the trust of his party. But his tough stand against Indian independence for forty long years ( 'Britain is nothing without India') was not diminished causing much frustrations to his people and to Gandhi himself.

The author focuses also on the two leader's personal differences even in their eating habits. Churchill loved his Cuban cigars, whiskies with his meaty foods, a combination which Gandhi steered away from following his mother's advice to avoid English food ( 'they eat animal meat' !!). He stayed a vegetarian all his life. But, at home Churchill cherished his wife, Clementine, and remained in close touch with her throughout his career. Gandhi was not as lucky; he fought frequently with his wife, Kasturbai, once even having to send her back to her father for a while (recalling the old popular song: Angelico! Mama got to take you back, and teach you all the things you lack...). The fact that she was illiterate must have stood in the way of their attempt at harmony until later in their lives.

If good temperament is crucial to charisma, how did these two leaders fair on this score? For Churchill, his rash attitude got him in trouble early on, especially at the Dardanelles where Britain lost over 400,000 lives following his plans and suggestions. Having been disgraced he was avoided and remained inactive for some time. Later on he was known for his excitement and aggressiveness in handling matters as well as in his attachment to tobacco and alcohol. (Later during WWII he regained his popularity thanks to his elocution as when he promised his people nothing but ' blood,sweat and tears' ). Vis-a-vis Gandhi, he was disrespectful calling him names and urging his destruction. To him Gandhi was nobody and his actions no more than an act.
Gandhi himself was mostly calm, collected and peaceful in spite of his frequent imprisonments. He stayed away from all forms of excesses. His main concerns were to rid India of the clutches of the British and to pacify and unite his own people. He excelled in the former task through peaceful resistance but stumbled on the latter due to entrenched, tenacious, racial differences which led later to his assassination. Sadly, he did not live to witness his country's full independence for which he fought so hard.

The author should be commended on his extensive research and his engaging style.

Fuad R. Qubein
Oct. 2016

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N C

Very well written, will increase your understanding 100fold

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 23, 2010

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This is the best book I have come across so far describing the historic developments since the great mutiny, leading up to Gandhi's life time, how he was affected by it, and likewise the same for Churchill.

It explains the personal circumstances and lives and the broad historic trends and movements. It illustrates through 100s of quotes and adorned with minute and detailed references how over the span of their respective lives, Churchill and Gandhi left their mark on history.

It reads like a novel, it is one of the rare books that manage to combine true historic facts with the readability of a novel.

And one of the biggest benefits must surely be that it increases your understanding of the political situations of the middle east and the far east tremendously. Suddenly wars, political deadlocks, national interests and actions - both present day and past - become so much clearer.

Very well done!

5 people found this helpful

BIG MAC

battle of the giants

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 13, 2014

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An excellent, probably the most accurate account of the Indian road to independence and an insight into the mindset of two important statesmen of the era. This book is too good to miss, however it should have included Nehru's speech "at the midnight hour", but read this book if you are at all interested in the great country of India.

One person found this helpful

Jasvinder Badh

Two complete ends of the spectrum - One for Empire and the other Against it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 11, 2014

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This books is a great comparison between the two great leaders and a lot of in depth detail is discussed regarding their early lives and how they entered into politics. What comes across is that Churchill hated Gandhi as he wanted the Empire to continue as like Randolph Churchill maintained that without it Britain would no longer exist or be of any consequence in world affairs. Gandhi was almost on a divine mission to achieve Indian independence and nothing stopped him from achieving this mission.

2 people found this helpful

bookworm

Balanced biographies and not a Gandhi hagiography!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 1, 2021

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Brilliant book particularly on Gandhi as a lot of Gandhi books and the movie are pure hagiographies!

Nicola

Brilliant book. One of the best I’ve read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 31, 2018

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Brilliant book. One of the best I’ve read. Unbiased views on Gandhi & Churchill. Well written and very interesting. A must for anyone with an interest in the history of Britain and India. Political and moving at the same time.

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