CHURCHILL, Winston S. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

First editions, first impressions, a superb presentation set, inscribed in each volume by Churchill to Anthony Eden, British prime minister, and Churchill’s wartime foreign secretary.
The volumes are respectively inscribed on the initial blanks: “Anthony and Clarissa from Winston 7 March 1956”; “To Anthony from Winston November 1956”; “To Anthony from Winston October 1957”; “To Anthony from Winston April 1958”. The first volume was published on 23 April 1956, which Churchill’s presentation on 7 March precedes by 6 weeks. The subsequent two volumes were inscribed in the month of publication, the fourth the month following publication.
The significance of the presentation of this set is difficult to overstate, and indeed, there are few individuals who could equal Eden in importance as a recipient. The two men were inseparable for the two most significant decades of their political careers. In the 1930s, during Churchill’s wilderness years, Eden was one of the few leading Conservative politicians who opposed appeasement and the Munich Agreement, resigning his first tenure as foreign secretary over the issue. Eden was re-appointed foreign secretary by Churchill in the wartime government, where he served loyally, skilfully navigating the turbulence of the war, and accepting Churchill’s preference to personally conduct the most important negotiations with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. While in opposition after the war Eden served under Churchill as deputy leader of the Conservative Party, returned as foreign secretary in Churchill’s second government, and on the great man’s retirement succeeded him as prime minister and party leader.
Eden and Churchill both represented an aristocratic style of Conservative Party and national leadership which, by Churchill’s death in 1965, can be said to have ended. Eden was perhaps the last British politician to genuinely share Churchill’s vision of Britain as a great imperial power, and indeed, to believe in the destiny of the English-speaking peoples as the greatest force for progress and civilization. It is this romantic notion which is the essence of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill’s great history presenting Britain, the empire, and the United States as one intertwined historical force. The work met with acclaim and proved an international best-seller, demonstrating the widespread popular enthusiasm for such a notion. It is all the more poignant, therefore, that Eden’s fall as prime minister following the Suez Crisis in late 1956 is generally seen as marking the effective end of Britain’s empire, and is placed by many as a moment of national crisis of confidence and the beginning of a sense of Britain’s decline. The inscriptions in this set bridge that moment, the first volume preceding, the second in the month of, and the latter two following, Suez.
Eden wrote to Churchill from Downing Street upon receiving the first volume to thank him, and noted “It is tough going here, but we are surviving” (11 March 1956, in Gilbert & Arnn, p. 2090); on receiving the third volume Eden wrote “I am already embarked, and enjoying the opening chapters of the voyage; it is grand writing and proud reading” (4 November 1957, ibid., p. 2192); on receiving the fourth, Eden wrote “I have already dipped, out of order, into the American Civil War, superbly told” (29 April, 1958, in ibid., p. 2216). Gilbert and Arnn do not record a thank-you message from Eden for the second volume, but as it was inscribed in the midst of the Suez Crisis, this is not surprising.