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In the Footsteps of Churchill is both a study in character and the story of an extraordinary career. As a soldier at Omdurman, Churchill took part in an old-style cavalry charge and was twice recommended for the Victoria Cross. He became a towering figure in British politics, changing parties twice (from the Conservatives to the Liberals and back again) and holding all the great offices of state expect Foreign Secretary. He was a journalist and historian, wrote some 80 books and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Much has been written about Churchill’s management of Britain as prime minister through the crisis years of the Second World War, but this book also explores the explosive colour of his early life. Holmes uses new material to investigate the influences that shaped the man; his troubled schooldays, his flamboyant political father, Randolph, and his famously attractive American mother, Jennie. Holmes argues that the qualities that made Churchill great also lead him to commit catastrophic blunders. The recklessness that made him a hero when he was a young correspondent during the Boer War, for example, cost thousand of Allied lives when it emerged during his planning of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, and may also have contributed to the fall of Singapore in 1942. Holmes examines the complexity of Churchill’s personality: his now unpalatable views on race and culture, his uneasy relationship with the trade unions, his deep depressions and his heavy smoking and drinking. In the Footsteps of Churchill takes us on an exhilarating journey through Harrow School, the North-West Frontier, the Sudan, South Africa, 10 Downing Street and his beloved Chartwell; a journey that begins in the aristocratic splendour of Blenheim Place and ends in the quiet country churchyard not far away – the compass of an extraordinary life in a few Oxfordshire acres.