Throughout his career Churchill was an outsider, accumulating a reputation for bad judgement and untrustworthiness. Only risk-takers and fellow outsiders would back him and he needed the company of like-minded individuals to create a social environment in which his personality could flourish. They were the acute and vigorous sparring-partners with whom he could hold the lively discussions which were life itself to him, in the convivial and epicurean surroundings he craved.

They were Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who invested a fortune amassed in obscure financial dealings in a press empire which served his quest for power; Brendan Bracken was the model for the shady parvenu politician Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, but the true story of the Irishman who came from nowhere is even more extraordinary; the young Bob Boothby who would earn notoriety by conducting a scandalous, adulterous affair with Harold Macmillan’s wife and dubious financial dealings; Frederick Lindemann – later Lord Cherwell – eminent scientist and ascetic, vegetarian and near-teetotal, who adored the cut and thrust of competitive conversation which was more important to the group than high-living.

Together they were Winston’s bandits, and this remarkable book tells the story of their friendship and of the part they played both in Churchill’s triumphs and disasters.

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