August 18, 2021

He took on paid lecture tours, writing books and popular newspaper articles (he had, after all, been one of the highest paid war correspondents in the world to supplement his income and to ensure he could still buy plenty of Pol Roger Champagne.

He even turned his ‘New York Misadventure’ – when he was seriously injured while in New York in December 1931 – into a story. Having been knocked down by a car when stepping off a pavement to cross busy Fifth Avenue, he then dictated a thousand words from his hospital bed for two newspaper articles under the headings ‘I was conscious through it all’ and ‘My New York Misadventure’.

Throughout his career, Churchill continued to write popular articles to supplement his political and literary income and maintain his lifestyle (and to pay for all those secretaries and research assistants). He was phenomenally productive – almost matching the output of a full-time journalist – and most of the time, this was while he was doing another job, too. Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s biographer, has recorded the output for just one year – 1937 – at sixty-four articles, well over one a week.

Churchill wasn’t precious about his writing or what he wrote about. With an apparently limitless capacity for work, and a wide range of interests, he even converted classic novels – ‘Great Stories of the World Retold’ – and the Bible – ‘Great Bible Stories Retold’ – into articles, and even abridged Shakespeare’s plays.