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Churchill, Winston S.
The Birth of Britain.
(Audiobook, Unabridged).
London: BBC Audiobooks, [1956] 2006.
ISBN 978-0-304-36389-6.
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This is the first book in Churchill's sprawling four-volume
A
History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Churchill began
work on the history in the 1930s, and by the time he set it aside
to go to the Admiralty in 1939, about half a million words
had been delivered to his publisher. His wartime service as
Prime Minister, postwar writing of the six-volume
history The Second World War,
and second term as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955 caused
the project to be postponed repeatedly, and it wasn't until
1956–1958, when Churchill was in his 80s, that the
work was published. Even sections which existed as print
proofs from the 1930s were substantially revised based upon
scholarship in the intervening years.
The Birth of Britain covers the period from Julius
Caesar's invasion of Britain in
55 B.C.
through
Richard III's defeat and death at the hands of Henry Tudor's forces at
the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, bringing to an end both the Wars of
the Roses and the Plantagenet dynasty. This is very much history in
the “kings, battles, and dates” mould; there is little
about cultural, intellectual, and technological matters—the
influence of the monastic movement, the establishment and growth of
universities, and the emergence of guilds barely figure at all in the
narrative. But what a grand narrative it is, the work of one of the
greatest masters of the language spoken by those whose history he
chronicles. In accounts of early periods where original sources
are scanty and it isn't necessarily easy to distinguish historical
accounts from epics and legends, Churchill takes pains to note
this and distinguish his own conclusions from alternative interpretations.
This audiobook is distributed in seven parts, totalling 17 hours.
A print edition is available in the UK.
January 2008