Churchill's Confidant

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At this moment there arrives in England from the outer marches of the Empire a new and altogether extraordinary man . . . The stormy and hazardous roads he has travelled by would fill all the acts and scenes of a drama. He has warred against us - well we knew it . . . His astonishing career and his versatile achievements are only the index of a profound sagacity and a cool, far-reaching comprehension . . .' Winston Churchill on Smuts's arrival in England in March 1917 The remarkable friendship between Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts is a rich study in contrasts. In youth they occupied very different worlds: Churchill, the rambunctious and thrusting young aristocrat, Smuts, the ascetic, philosophical farm boy from the Western Cape in South Africa who would go on to Cambridge where, in an unprecedented achievement, he sat both parts of a law tripos simultaneously and won a double first. Brought together first as enemies in the Anglo-Boer War, and later as allies in the First World War, the men forged a friendship that spanned the first half of the twentieth century and endured until Smuts's death in 1950. Richard Steyn, author of the bestselling Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, examines this close friendship through two world wars and the intervening years, drawing on a wealth of archival and secondary sources, including letters, telegrams and the voluminous books written about both men. This is a fascinating account of two exceptional men in war and peace: one the leader of an empire, the other the leader of a small, fractious member of that empire who rose to global prominence. '[He was] probably more fitted to guide struggling and blundering humanity through its sufferings and perils towards a better day than anyone who lived in any country during his epoch.'Winston Churchill in a letter of condolence to Smuts's widow, Isie Smuts