Churchill, who excelled in the study of history as a child and whose mother was an American, had a firm belief in a so-called "special relationship" between the people of Britain and its Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.)

At the independent suggestions of British publisher Newman Flower[2] and American editor Maxwell Perkins,[3] Churchill began the history in the 1930s, during the period that his official biographer Martin Gilbert termed the "wilderness years" when he was not in government.

Work was interrupted in 1939 when the Second World War broke out and Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and became Prime Minister a year later.

[4] Political opponent Clement Attlee suggested the work should have been titled "Things in history that interested me.

In The Daily Telegraph, J. H. Plumb wrote: "This history will endure; not only because Sir Winston has written it, but also because of its own inherent virtues — its narrative power, its fine judgment of war and politics, of soldiers and statesmen, and even more because it reflects a tradition of what Englishmen in the hey-day of their empire thought and felt about their country's past.