Shedding a different light on Churchill

Revered in this country as probably the greatest Briton, Winston Churchill is seen rather differently in Ireland.

On BBC Parliament's BOOKtalk this weekend, I'll be talking to the historian Paul Bew, a crossbench peer, about his new study of Churchill's lifelong relationship with Ireland.

It charts a childhood where his father was part of the administration in Dublin in an era of menace, when two British officials were hacked to death with surgical knives when walking in the park, through his gladiatorial role in the bitter battles over Home Rule in the Edwardian era, to his direct negotiation with the Sinn Fein revolutionaries in the early 1920s, against a background of brutal sectarian violence.

Lord Bew's book sheds a fascinating light on Churchill as, at once, a romantic imperialist and a brutally pragmatic political practitioner.

You can watch him on Saturday at 8.45pm, and on Sunday at 5.45pm, on BBC Parliament.