Richard M. Langworth

Duty and Destiny

History & Biography

“Gary Scott Smith, with detail and good research, tackles the complicated relationship between religion and politics in Churchill’s thought. We learn that Churchill was a believer in a faith—which was at the heart of his appeal in the Second World War—but not necessarily a practitioner. His book confirms Churchill’s quip that he accumulated in youth ‘so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since, [never making] enquiries about the state of my account. It might well even be that I should find an overdraft.’”