“Winston Churchill appeared to me,” Charles De Gaulle wrote in 1959, “from one end of the drama to the other, as the great champion of a great enterprise and the great artist of a great history.” Churchill was not only the author, both literally and figuratively, of a great history, but he has also been one of its more enduring subjects. Few men have been both more studied and more mythologized. And David Reynolds’s new book, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him, helps explain why.

Meant as a successor volume of sorts to Churchill’s own 1937 work, Great Contemporaries, which examined the lives and careers of 25 of the parliamentarian’s peers, the book explores the great British war leader through character sketches of eleven of his contemporaries. Reynolds is no stranger to Churchill. The famed Cambridge historian and frequent BBC presenter has authored numerous works and narrated several documentaries on the legendary British prime minister. But by exploring Churchill’s life through the careers of his contemporaries, friend and foe alike, Reynolds hopes to “discover a novel way both to narrate and also to interrogate this remarkable life.”