2024 Robert Kirk Underhill Lecture in Anglo-American Studies : David Reynolds (Univ. of Cambridge) - Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him

The annual Robert Kirk Underhill Lecture is sponsored by the Anglo-American Studies Program. It features a leading figure or figures from political or scholarly circles speaking on US and UK political, legal, or cultural affairs.

This year’s speaker is David Reynold (University of Cambridge), who will present on “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders who Shaped him.”

Winston Churchill is 150 years young. Born in 1874, he continues to arouse passions in our own day – lauded for his leadership against Nazism, castigated for his colonial worldview. He’s often portrayed as a solitary genius, standing alone, but this lecture will show how his path to greatness was shaped by his encounters with other leaders.

Men whom he admired, such as David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt; others who got in his way: notably Adolf Hitler; and some whom he misread, especially Josef Stalin. One woman was also indispensable: his wife Clementine.

Marriage to Winston proved exhausting but it made her a leader in her own right.

David Reynolds is an award-winning historian and Emeritus Professor of International History at Cambridge University (Christ’s College). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. Author of fourteen books, ranging across British, US and European history in the twentieth century, his most recent works include Island Stories: Britain and its history in the age of Brexit (2019) and Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him (2023)