For seven decades the powerful, influential and successful beat a path to Winston Churchill’s door. He shook hands with every prime minister from Lord Rosebery to Mrs Thatcher, and almost every president from William McKinley to Richard Nixon. He talked physics with Albert Einstein, cinema with Charlie Chaplin, imperialism with Mark Twain and art with Walter Sickert. He angered Theodore Roosevelt, admired John F. Kennedy, mentored Edward Heath and was accosted by Frank Sinatra. He lived a life so packed with meaning and ministerial office – and of such historical significance – that he can make his contemporaries seem rather small by comparison. The result is that – in books about Churchill – his friends, colleagues, acquaintances and foes often appear as fish do to a scuba diver; darting briefly into view before disappearing back into the gloom.

Yet these relationships mattered to Churchill, both personally and professionally. His collaboration with Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George created much of the modern welfare state; his work with Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Charles de Gaulle and Harry Truman moulded the postwar world. And, throughout his career, he was supported, informed, inspired and assisted by a whole host of others – politicians, bankers, industrialists, scientists, journalists and publishers – who can be, often unfairly, reduced by historians to a footnote.

Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network and David Reynolds’ Mirrors of Greatness attempt to redress the balance, taking Churchill’s relationships as their subject. In doing so, they explain what Churchill’s contemporaries meant to him, saw in him, did for him – and how they changed history. Each book, in its own way, drags important men and women out of Churchill’s orbit and stands them alongside him.

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Reynolds’ book takes a wider view. Each chapter analyses one of Churchill’s relationships beginning with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Through a judicious selection of contemporaries, Churchill is shown in roles that will be largely unfamiliar to the general reader. He is cast as his father’s acolyte, Lloyd George’s lackey, Mahatma Gandhi’s antagonist and Neville Chamberlain’s competitor. The chapter on Chamberlain is particularly interesting. The two men are generally known as opponents on Appeasement, with Chamberlain catastrophically wrong and Churchill triumphantly right. But here Reynolds shows the full sweep of their relationship, stretching back to the 1920s, when they uneasily collaborated in Stanley Baldwin’s government. Chamberlain then bested Churchill, succeeded to the premiership and sternly resisted all calls to give his beaten rival ministerial office until the outbreak of the Second World War made Churchill’s return irresistible. This chapter is a vivid reminder that, despite Churchill’s reputation as a world historical figure, he spent 40 years as just one of many ministerial talents, and he was often beaten by those who have, by now, been either forgotten or otherwise diminished.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Joel Nelson is working on a book about John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill for PublicAffairs.