From Dominion to Doctor Who: Winston Churchill in fiction

Ten books to mark the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death

Winston Churchill at his desk in 1945. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

John Dugdale

Tuesday 27 January 2015 - The Guardian

Savrola by Winston Churchill (1899)

Like his No 1 contemporary fan, Boris Johnson, the future Nobel literature laureate produced one novel and then stopped; and as in Boris’s Seventy-Two Virgins, in which a bicycling Tory MP pulls off a heroic counter-terrorist feat, the protagonist is transparently a fantasy version of his creator: an idealistic opposition leader in a Ruritanian state, “powerless to resist” his own ambition. Does the title show the debut novelist was improbably influenced by George Eliot?

The Churchill Play by Howard Brenton (1974)

Churchill returns from the grave in an internment camp named after him, in a leftist savaging of his career that nevertheless created less of a stir than Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers (rehearsed then cancelled by the National Theatre in 1967), which had the advantage of claiming that in 1943 the PM ordered the murder of his Polish counterpart.

The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins (1975)

Wartime novel in which the Germans try to kidnap Churchill during his stay at a Norfolk country house. A bestseller (and continuing gift to headline-writers, as seen last week) that became a film with Hollywood stars as unconvincing Nazis.

Ladysmith by Giles Foden (1999)

Foden’s second novel works in Churchill’s Boer war adventures in his mid-20s, when he escaped from a PoW camp and was part of the British force relieving the eponymous siege.

Winston’s War by Michael Dobbs (2003)

After his contemporary House of Cards trilogy centred on the squalidly machiavellian Francis Urquhart, Dobbs wrote four docu-novels set in the glorious past when a giant ruled the land – but only after Chamberlain had been kicked out, as novelised in this first instalment.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (2009)

In Jonasson’s international mega-seller, Churchill is one of several historical figures whom the hero encounters in flashback scenes: travelling the world after his election defeat in 1945, Winston is in Iran, where the shah’s spooks want Allan to assassinate him.

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (2010)

In the last year of his life, the ex-PM will soon be an ex-MP and his “black dog” (depression) has become a real talking dog that torments him, in a debut with echoes of The Master and Margarita.

Doctor Who: Victory of the Daleks by Mark Gatiss (2010)

A long-standing ally of the Doctor(s), – both, after all, are saving the planet – Churchill, during the Blitz, spots that the “ironsides” acquired as weaponry are really disguised Daleks who threaten to destroy the Earth. How did historians miss this?

Dominion by CJ Sansom (2012)

Alternative history set in the 50s: the Nazis rule Europe, a Vichy-style puppet regime rules Britain and – in contrast to his non-roles in other counterfactual novels positing a German victory, Len Deighton’s SS-GB (executed) and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (exiled) - Churchill leads the resistance.

The Audience by Peter Morgan (2013)

An ageing 1950s Winston is the first of the prime ministers calling on Elizabeth II, who stands up to him, in the stage hit by the author of The Queen and Frost/Nixon.