Dinner With Churchill

Dinners meant a lot to Churchill – a friend once said of him, ‘He is a man of simple tastes; he is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.’

But meals were always more for him than just good food and fine wine. Over seventy years the dinner table became a stage for his own brilliant conversational talents, an intimate world in which both gossip and diplomatic secrets could be shared…

In this riveting, entertaining book, Cita Stelzer examines ten of the key dinners at which Churchill presided during WWII, and shows how in this crucial period he used his superlative social and rhetorical skills to bring about serious political change.

With fascinating new material on the food he ate, the champagnes he loved, as well as original menus, seating plans, and unpublished photographs, Dinner with Churchill is a sumptuous treat. It reveals the care with which Churchill planned his charm offensives against both natyral allies, like Roosevelt, and potential antagonists, like Stalin, on his favourite battlefield – a luxurious dining-room, primed and loaded, from soup to nuts, from cocktails to liqueurs.