CHURCHILL & SON

Few fathers and sons can ever have been so close as Winston Churchill and his only son Randolph. Both showed flamboyant impatience, reckless bravery, and generosity of spirit. The glorious and handsome Randolph was a giver and devourer of pleasure, a man who exploded into rooms, trailing whisky tumblers and reciting verbatim whole passages of classic literature. But while Randolph inherited many of his father's talents, he also inherited many of his flaws - he was fiercer, louder and more out of control, hence father and son would be very close but also liable to explode at each other. Winston's closest ally during the wilderness years of the 1930s, Randolph would himself become a war hero, serving with the SAS in the desert and Marshal Tito's guerrillas in Yugoslavia, a friend of press barons and American presidents alike, and a journalist with a 'genius for uncovering secrets', able to secure audiences with everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to General Franco and Guy Burgess. But Randolph's political career never amounted to anything. As much as he idolised his father Winston and never lost faith in him during the long, solitary years of Winston's decline, Randolph was never able to escape from his shadow. Their lives and love was complex and combustible, complicated by money, class and privilege and shaded by ambition, oversized expectations, resentments and failures. This is the story of how Winston Churchill built and broke his son. Randolph died young, his body rotted by resentment and drink, before he could complete his father's biography. A revealing new perspective is Churchill reading Peter Rabbit books to his children, admonishing Eton schoolmasters and using decanters and wine glasses to re-fight the Battle of Jutland at the table. Amid a cast of personalities who defined an era - P. G. Wodehouse, Nancy Astor, The Mitfords, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lord Beaverbrook, William Randolph Hearst, Oswald Mosley, Graham Greene, Duff and Diana Cooper, the Kennedys, Charlie Chaplin and Lloyd George, the book is a lost story of a timeless father-son relationship. 453pp, eight pages of mono photos, remainder mark.