Sir Winston Churchill’s reading list has resurfaced, and it includes crime dramas, romances, and an adventure novel. In 1960, the former prime minister was preparing for his fourth cruise aboard the Christina, the private yacht of Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
The ship left Tangier on March 10 and crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, where it made various stops, from Trinidad to Puerto Rico, before Churchill flew home on April 2. For his trip, Churchill’s private secretary prepared a list of 23 books that the politician would have available to him during the three-week cruise. Martin Gilbert wrote in his official biography of Churchill that “it was books that now occupied most of Churchill’s active hours”. The list included: Call of the Wild by Jack London; The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Mansfield Park by Jane Austen; The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad; A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene; The Master of Balantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson; and Béatrix by Honoré de Balzac. The Call of the Wild is an adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903. It is set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand.
The central character is a dog named Buck, who is stolen from his home in California and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska, where he becomes more primitive, shedding the veneer of civilisation in the harsh environment.
The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1880, that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality.
Set in 19th-century Russia, it focuses on the dysfunctional Karamazov family and the murder of the cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich.
Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, published in 1814, that tells the story of timid Fanny Price, starting when her overburdened family sends her at the age of 10 to live in the household of her wealthy aunt and uncle.
The story follows her development into early adulthood, where her steadfast moral character stands in contrast to the superficial and morally ambiguous activities of her cousins and their new, manipulative neighbours.
The Arrow of Gold is a 1919 romance novel by Joseph Conrad. Set in Marseille in the 1870s during the Third Carlist War, it features a love triangle between the narrator and two others.
The characters of the novel are supporters of the Spanish Pretender Carlos, Duke of Madrid. The novel features a person referred to as “Lord X”, whose activities as an arms smuggler resemble those of the Carlist politician Tirso de Olazábal y Lardizábal, Count of Arbelaiz.
A Gun for Sale is a 1936 crime novel by Graham Greene about an English assassin, Raven, who is hired to kill a government minister in a European country to provoke a European war.
When he is paid, with stolen notes, for killing the minister, he becomes a man on the run. Tracking down the agent who double-crossed him and eluding the police simultaneously, he becomes both the hunter and the hunted.
The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale is an 1889 novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It focuses on the conflict between two brothers, Scottish noblemen, when their family is torn apart after they join opposite sides of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
The brother who joined the doomed rising is forced to flee Scotland, taking the story to the French Indies and the North American wilderness, while his brother takes over the family estate.
Béatrix is an 1839 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. It tells the story of Calyste du Guénic, a young man who falls for the beautiful, cold, and manipulative Béatrix de Rochefide.
Their tragic and obsessive love triangle also involves the ageing writer Félicité des Touches and the musician Gennaro Conti, Béatrix’s former lover and Calyste’s rival. The novel explores themes of passion, societal constraints, and the complex nature of ambition and sacrifice.