History

Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made by Richard Toye

Item: Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made
Author: Robin Prior

by Robin Prior •

March 2011, no. 329

Pan Macmillan, $70 hb, 440 pp, 9780230703841

History

Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made by Richard Toye

by Robin Prior •

March 2011, no. 329

Empires are out of fashion. The idea of one people ruling over another has had its day. The mention of any empire – with the possible exception of the Roman one, for which people still have a certain fondness – will almost invariably meet with deprecating comments, even derision. The Dutch, the French, the Belgian, the German, the Russian (if it is even remembered that Russia had an empire), and the British empires have all been cast into the dustbin of history and are things to be generally lamented.

Robin Prior

Robin Prior was born in rural South Australia. He studied at the University of Adelaide, completing a doctorate in 1979. He was an ARC Fellow at Adelaide for three years before taking a position with the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He was Head of the School of History from 1998 to 2004 and Foundation Head of the School of Humanities and Social Science from 2004 to 2007. He is now Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He has published widely on World War I: Command on the Western Front, Passchendaele: The Untold Story (1996) and The Somme (2005) with Trevor Wilson, and Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ As History (1983) and Gallipoli (2009), as sole author. He is an editor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (1995). He is working on a book on Britain in 1940.