Into the Abyss: Winston Churchill and the Origins of Two World Wars
David Day’s forthcoming book looks at the decisive role that Winston Churchill played in precipitating Britain’s involvement in two world wars. It examines the fascination that war had for Churchill and the political, financial and psychological pressures that drove him to seek success and fulfillment either on the battlefield itself, directing the battles from afar or writing about them later.
Forced by the early death of his syphilitic father to be head of an impoverished branch of a noble family, and harbouring feelings of rejection by his parents and doubts about his masculinity, the manic depressive Churchill found acclaim and acceptance, as well as confirmation of his courage and his manhood, on battlefields from the mountain passes of India’s North-West Frontier to the beaches of Normandy.
Brought low by the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, and denied the restoration of his reputation by the sudden end of that war, Churchill spent the next twenty years seeking to shape the unpropitious times to suit his political purposes. Far from the moment finding the man in 1940, as most historians have argued, Day shows how the astute Churchill remained master of his destiny throughout the interwar period and in many ways made the moment that finally secured his place in history.
Book Author
David Day’s big break came when he sold the film rights to a seminar paper while doing his Ph.D. at Cambridge. That led to the highly acclaimed, Menzies and Churchill at War (1986), which has seldom been out of print. Two more books on the Second World War were published soon after and have been re-published by HarperCollins as The Politics of War (2003).
In 1996, David published a groundbreaking history of Australia, Claiming a Continent, which developed the notion of Australia as a supplanting society. Published by HarperCollins, the book won the Non-Fiction Prize at the Adelaide F...
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