Sir Winston Churchill was a well-traveled man. By the time he was twenty-five, his thirst for adventure had taken him to Cuba, India’s North-West frontier, the Sudan, and South Africa, as well as to battle, prison, and worldwide fame. During World War II, when as prime minister he held Britain’s destiny in his hands, he hazarded arduous journeys not only to confer face-to-face with his allies Roosevelt and Stalin, but also to witness firsthand the action at the front. In later years, his enduring passion for painting prompted travels to locales like Marrakech. (He took President Roosevelt there in 1943, simply to view a splendid sunset.) Celia Sandys actually accompanied her famous grandfather on some of his later travels, most memorably on a cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht Christina, but for this always-engaging book she herself has retraced his many journeys over seventy years on four continents, and sought the people who knew, entertained, consulted, or simply crossed paths with him. In their long-untold stories she finds her grandfather’s character illuminated in new, revealing, and often surprising ways.

Excerpted from review by Richard Langworth, Finest Hour, Churchill Centre:
It is one of the best short biographies ever published about Churchill, and, in my opinion, Celia Sandys’ best book yet.  For someone who regards reading every new book about Churchill as a contractual duty (which probably explains my often jaundiced reviews), my tremendous enjoyment of this book is quite a serious recommendation. Like most books written to support a TV production, Churchill is profusely illustrated in color and black and white. The author tends to avoid the “old chestnuts” and provides some uncommon and interesting photos. It gets harder all the time to find any new artwork on Churchill, so this alone is worth the price of the volume. Unfortunately it was not published in North America. Its absence among American publishers seems odd, because Churchill was written to accompany the recent ITV/PBS television documentary, which was well received in the United States even before it was aired in Great Britain.  Here is the ideal “Churchill 101” for those who want to know a lot quickly—it is NOT, by the way, a “juvenile,” though literate young people will find it good.  Note: A new edition of this title has been adopted as the official book of the Churchill Museum, opening in February 2005 at The Cabinet War Room, London.

In this stirring biography of a brash, resourceful Churchill in his early twenties, Celia Sandys retraces her illustrious grandfather's path through South Africa as she reconstructs his adventures during nine months of the Anglo-Boer War at the end of the last century. She visits the campsites where the bold war correspondent and ready soldier bivouacked, the battlefields where he skirmished and fought, the site of his incarceration in Pretoria as the Boers' prisoner of war; she follows the route of his daring escape to the Mozambique border. Using both British and South African sources, which alternately reveal the young combatant as a courageous ally or formidable foe, Sandys narrates the heart-stopping exploits of a Churchill that history has largely forgotten. Yet his heroics in Africa thrust him to fame on the international stage, and within three months of his return to England, at the age of twenty-five, Churchill became a member of Parliament. 

Most Churchill biographies pay scant attention to the statesman's formative years and the childhood influences on his character and personality. In this charmer of a book, Sandys, his granddaughter, has assembled early writings and artistic efforts, family letters and school reports, along with Churchill's mature recollections and her own illuminating commentary, to fill the gap. Winston's letters from boarding school reflect extremes of mood from cockiness to utter dejection, presaging the depression that plagued his later years. The collection includes revealing interchanges with his mother and with his beloved nanny, and stern letters of correction from his adored but hard-to-please father. The book covers the years from his birth in 1874 to his coming of age in 1895, when Churchill was commissioned into the Fourth Hussars cavalry unit. Generously illustrated with photos, facsimiles of letters, school reports, sketches and Churchill's later oil paintings of childhood haunts.

In We Shall Not Fail, Celia Sandys, with coauthor Jonathan Littman, offers a new take on the greatness of Churchill, highlighting the traits he employed throughout his life, especially the remarkable strength he displayed leading the British people through the horrors of World War II.