Product Description

At the close of World War Two, in 1945, the most powerful men alive - Winston Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - gather to survey the smoking ruins of Europe at the famous Yalta Conference. They must try and create a future where the atrocities of the last few years could never happen again. But as the negotiations begin that will eventually change the map of the world, the tension and pressure on political partnerships intensifies. In the fight against Hitler, Churchill’s difficult relationship with the leaders of the Allied Powers, Roosevelt and Stalin, becomes a power struggle that will have the most dramatic global consequences.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #171222 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

About the Author
During his eventful career, Michael Dobbs has acted as advisor to Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and been both Chief of Staff and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. He was Deputy Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi and a regular presenter of BBC TV’s ‘Despatch Box’. His previous novels include the bestselling HOUSE OF CARDS, (made into a popular TV series), and more recently Goodfellowe MP, The Buddha of Brewer Street, and Whispers of Betrayal. He has been a judge of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating look at a crucial piece of history
I have to say that this is the first of Mr Dobbs' books that I have read, having picked it up at an airport bookstore, but it assuredly won't be the last.

The Yalta conference in early 1945 pretty much decided the fate of much of the post WW II world, yet to ordinary readers little is known about it. Perhaps it is just as well. To think that the world as we have known it for the past six decades was effectively shaped by a desperately ill Roosevelt who could no longer argue with a mouse, a Churchill whose influence was on the wane, and a rampant Stalin is all too frightening.

Mr Dobbs has done a splendid job of going behind the scenes of Yalta and giving non-historians possibly their first glimpse of what went on. He does a particularly good job of showing Churchill, not as the superhuman hero, but as an all-too-human person facing the reality that his country is about to be left behind in the Superpower Stakes. We have Roosevelt, a broken man, and we have Stalin, all revealed for what they truly were at the time.

Mr Dobbs does not hero worship Churchill, even calling him a naive old fool at one point. This is historical fiction at about its very best, and the book is highly recommended.

Victory blunted
"Old men, worn down by war, who couldn't properly finish what they had begun. It summed up the story of Yalta." - Author Michael Dobbs, in CHURCHILL'S TRIUMPH

From February 4 - 11, 1945, Churchill, Stalin and FDR met at Yalta in the Crimea to tie up the loose ends of World War II. Each had an agenda: the American President wanted the establishment of the United Nations, Russia's entry into the war against Japan, and his personal place in history; the British Prime Minister wanted a free Poland (as, unstated, a block to Soviet westward expansion); the Communist Party Secretary General wanted territory in Eastern Europe and spoils. In the end, it was the wily, rapacious Stalin that dominated the conference. FDR, exhausted and sick and with only eight weeks to live, no longer had the mental energy to perceive and resist Uncle Joe's duplicity. And Winston, though he fought like a lion, was, much like the British Empire, no longer relevant to the larger designs of the world's two new superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

CHURCHILL'S TRIUMPH, presumably solidly based in the factual history of the summit, is a fictional narrative of the conference as seen through the eyes of Winston, who, apparently ignored and abandoned by his friend Roosevelt, is beside himself with frustration at his inability to alter the course of diplomacy and appeasement.

Perhaps the most engaging character of the story is that of Churchill's manservant, the loyal but cheeky Frank Sawyers, a real person who, unfortunately, exited history after leaving his master's service in 1946. (Loyal readers of Michael Dobb's will remember Sawyers from a previous book in the Churchill series, CHURCHILL'S HOUR. Indeed, Google "Frank Sawyers" and there's virtually no information on the man beyond his inclusion in the author's books - a pity.)

CHURCHILL'S TRIUMPH suffers, I think, from the inclusion of a fictitious subplot involving a refugee Pole, Marian Nowak, held virtual prisoner by the Russians and pressed into service by his jailers as a plumber at Churchill's borrowed Crimean residence, the Vorontsov Palace. The uneasy relation between the British PM and Nowak, which carried through to the end of the book set in 1963, allowed Winston to pronounce what he thought his nebulous triumph at Yalta to have been. But to me, this subplot seemed contrived and, at its conclusion, overly melodramatic . Another sidebar, this taking place in the fictitious Polish village of Piorun, was sufficient to illustrate the validity of Winston's ominous forebodings regarding Soviet intent in Eastern Europe.

The Yalta story, as the basis for a novel about Churchill, is powerful enough by itself and doesn't need embellishment. Particularly revelatory of the conference were the words of Octavius from Shakespeare's "Julius Ceasar" quoted by the PM as they put their signatures to paper in the concluding signing ceremony:

"Let us do so, for we are at the stake and bayed about with many enemies. And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear, millions of mischiefs."

Have read better
This is the first Michael Dobbs novel I've read, and I've found it very heavy going.

Although you may think it's a historic novel, it is, but I'd say it's more a political history novel.

The novel is based around Winston Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin and how they come together to work out peace for all. During the novel you'll find out how they lie, cheat and deceive one another to reach that peace agreement and how they make sure that history remembers them.

Personally I found this really hard to read and at times wanted to give up on it but I'm glad I didn't. It's not a novel I'd read again or keep in my book collection.