Summer Book Club: Churchill's Queen

Nigel Fletcher, welcome to Sincerely in Churchill.

Thank you.

It's an absolute joy to be with you.

When another book on Churchill comes out in particular, I often think, gosh, I mean, what else is there still to say? And you've mentioned in the book that there's basically a whole genre of Churchill studies.

And yet, I think with this book, you do have something quite new and interesting to say about both because of how you tell the history, I think you're a great storyteller, but also because how you sift through the evidence and dispel myths.

There were certain assumptions that I had made about that period of history that you're looking at between the relationship between Elizabeth II and Churchill that I thought I knew, and then I'm sort of told something slightly differently, and it's because of your meticulous sifting through the archival material – But before we dive into all of that, I just wanted to get a sense from you, Nigel, about why you decided to write this book and how you went about writing it.

It's obviously you're choosing two very daunting subjects, Elizabeth II and Churchill, these two iconic subjects to write about, which must carry its own sort of sense of weight and responsibility on you as an author.

Yeah.

Yes, indeed.

And I mean, it's very good of you to say that you think I have found new things to say.

But it was certainly very daunting to approach these two giants of history.

And as you say, there was an entire industry involved.

in Churchill studies, particularly, there's libraries full of books on Churchill, and of course, on Elizabeth as well.

And sort of approaching them in that way, I sort of thought, well, you know, there must be, you know, there must be sort of stories that have been told before and been repeated and repeated and repeated.

which have got somehow lost in translation.

And that was one of the things which, as an historian, as someone who likes primary sources, I was really keen to sort of get to the bottom of some of these.

And actually, it was also sort of returning to perhaps my first love, really, because...

I'm a political historian.

I call myself now a sort of political and constitutional historian because I do do quite a bit on the monarchy as well.

But primarily, I'm a political historian.

And so writing about members of the royal family and writing about the late queen was perhaps a bit of a departure.

But it was actually returning to what was perhaps my first interest in history.

If I think back to my childhood, you know, the books that I was buying as a teenager and the programs that I was watching were They were royal documentaries and royal biographies.

I remember, I think I, in the introduction to the book, made reference to some of the books that I remember reading and some of the programs I remember watching when I was very young.

I was fascinated by the queen and by the monarchy.