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Introduction by Phil Reed, OBE

There have been more books written about Winston

Churchill than almost anyone else in history, and each

year sees a new crop appear, many repeating or recycling

the contents of others, adding nothing new to our

understanding of the man. Specialist texts aplenty analyse

his political career and philosophy, his writings, his travels,

his relationships (personal and political) and his strategic

skills; the density of the texts, however, ranges from

journalistic to recondite academic. Books of cartoons of

him, of his paintings, and of his habits and tastes tend to

be more approachable, though they convey only a bare

sliver of who he was. And while books of his bons mots,

quotations and extracts from his writings are legion, too

many contain misquotations and use a thin selection of

quotations to offer quick amusement (and earn a fast buck).

There is also no shortage of books of photographs of him,

charting his life and career. From his school days onwards,

Churchill courted the camera – so much so that most of the

images so familiar to us are ones that he purposely allowed

or encouraged. His view that “history will be my judge and

I will write the history” applied as much to images as to

text, and the photographs we have of him in our minds are

largely those that he wanted us to have: the stern, bullish

leader of the famous Karsh portrait; the fatherly figure of

the wartime posters; and the clown twirling his hat on his

stick. These images have been widely used – and abused – to

peddle a position or brand goods and services that have

no relationship to him and his life. They each illustrate

different aspects of his character and style and, these many

years later, their familiarity both colours and constrains our

views of the man.

Photography allows us to make judgments about a person

that prose does not; the latter dictates to us a particular

view, whereas the photograph allows us to speculate

about the character, even the thoughts, of the subject as

implied by the details of the image. But we have been

subjected to the same images of Churchill over and over

for decades; gaining new insights from images that have

become quotidian, even passé, is ever more difficult. The

Man Within offers less-known images, often ones that

were not quite so engineered by Churchill himself. When

matched with the more well-known images, they provide

a much broader picture of the man. When that range of

images is paired with a robust selection of quotations – from

pithy, situational one-liners to pondering reflections on

humanity – we glimpse not just the titanic figure but the

human being.