Winston Churchill was truly a man of the world. In his long career as a soldier and statesman, and latterly as a global celebrity and artist, he visited and wrote about the length and breadth of the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Cuba, the Indian subcontinent, North, South and East Africa and the Soviet Union. From colonial wars to Cold War, Churchill was witness to the decline of Britain from the era of imperial power to the age of austerity in a world dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Both his own status and that of Great Britain can be viewed through prisms ranging from the apogee of Empire to the privations of the post-war era, from the South African veldt to the bleakness of the Soviet Crimea during the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where the ‘Big Three’ – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – settled the shape of Europe that emerged after the defeat of the Third Reich.

Man of the World provides a journey through his life and thought as it was filtered through the landscapes he encountered in a career almost unimaginable today: the Kaiser’s Germany in the days before the Great War; the United States in the Roaring Twenties; being in New York on the very day of the Wall Street Crash; the curdled delights of the Crimea during the Yalta Conference of 1945 and the French Riviera of the post-war years – all left their mark on him as he did on them.

Winston Churchill always found his bouts of foreign travel, particularly in the Second World War, more invigorating than exhausting, regardless of the outcome of any individual trip – an aspect of his inexhaustible passion for life.