Reviews
Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviews David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money
June 2016 edition of The New York Review
June’s edition of The New York Review carries a long essay Churchill: Great and Mean in which Geoffrey Wheatcroft discusses both David Lough’s No More Champagne and Sonia Purnell’s The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill. Wheatcroft describes No More Champagne as ‘hugely enjoyable and illuminating’ and ‘richly detailed and accurate’.
He writes: ‘What’s notable is that all the best recent books have dealt with specific aspects of [Churchill]. … Lough’s book completes a kind of triptych of splendid books. First came In Command of History by David Reynolds (2005) … . Then in 2012 Peter Clarke, another Cambridge historian, published Mr. Churchill’s Profession.’
Read the full review at New York Review June 2016
Editor Francis Beckett of Third Age Matters describes No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money as ‘one of the most compelling history books ever written’ in his review which appears in the magazine’s Spring 2016 edition.
Beckett writes: ‘Winston Churchill’s wartime premiership, which made him the twentieth century’s towering political figure, has left a faint aura of sanctity over the man, which fits as snugly as football boot on a dolphin. The extraordinary character revealed in this remarkable book seems to live in a different universe from the heroic figure who told his people: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight int he fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” …
“David Lough had a career in banking after taking a first class degree in History at Oxford, and he has been able to apply a forensic financial brain to the bank statements and other materials Churchill left behind to build up a comprehensive picture of a life lived constantly on the edge. The result is one of the most compellingly history books ever written. Each new page brings a new, stupefying revelation. ‘
Spear’s Magazine, a publication widely read in the wealth management industry, calls No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money ‘fresh and fascinating’:
‘Churchill has hardly been deprived of biographical attention, but Lough, a former private banker, has produced a fascinating and fresh study of the man, of whom he says he has ‘never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale during my career of advising people about their finances’.
Read the full review here.
NPR blog The Salt calls No More Champagne a ‘magnificently researched new book’ on Winston Churchill, as seen through the prism of his chaotic personal finances. The Salt calls author David Lough a ‘skilled financial gumshoe’, a term he had to look up in the Anglo-Americasn dictionary. It seems it’s informal American slang term for a detective. In fact British film director Stephen Frears called his first film Gumshoe in 1971.
Read the full review here.
New Criterion predicts No More Champagne to become a classic
American magazine The New Criterion has hailed David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money as a potential ‘classic’ that ‘will transform the way in which Churchill is interpreted and understood’.
The reviewer, the well-known monetary economist and writer Professor Timothy Congdon, writes:
‘Lough deserves high praise for bringing together disparate sources of information and making sense of them, and so providing the first integrated account of this important aspect of Churchill’s life. He also organises the material in an easy-to-understand way and writes beautifully. The book reads as effortlessly as a novel, although in truth if it had been sent to a publisher as a work of fiction or even as a historical romance it would have been rejected on grounds of total implausibility.’