No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money
David Lough

Book Reviews

• "David Lough, an Oxford historian now in the world of finance, has charted the hitherto little known and sometimes heroic saga of the Churchills’ struggle to achieve liquidity. He is a courteous guide, whose knowledge of the arcane world of investment (and its pitfalls) enables him to explain what went wrong and how Churchill managed to scrape through. The result is a fascinating read, although an unnerving one for anyone who has the tastes and appetites of Mr Toad and the income of Mr Rat."
  The Times
• "Debut author Lough, an investment advisor, succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation in making this unique chronicle of Winston Churchill’s money problems fascinating, even for those with limited interest in financial matters… Lough’s detailed, but fast-moving, narrative succeeds in making one of British history’s most prominent men more relatable; as Lough notes, “it is salutary to discover that one of the most successful political figures of the 20th century ran up huge personal debts, gambled heavily, lost large amounts on the stock exchange, avoided tax with great success, and paid his bills reluctantly.""
  Publishers Weekly
• "This excellent and entertaining work is worth reading for the lists of more than 1,000 bottles of champagne and 250 bottles of brandy that Churchill got through in 1949 alone. "
  Financial Times
• "Brilliantly illuminates one of the few unexplored aspects of Winston Churchill's life."
  Piers Brendon
• "Opens up new insights into the life and lifestyle of Britain's most famous 20th-century leader."
  David Reynolds, author of In Command of History
• "Minutely researched and richly enjoyable."
  Paul Mason, Channel 4 News
• "This excellent and entertaining work is worth reading for the lists of more than 1,000 bottles of champagne and 250 bottles of brandy that Churchill got through in 1949 alone."
  Vicky Pryce, Prospect
• "This is the first biography to focus on Churchill’s business affairs. To view someone from just one angle is usually to deform them, but David Lough, drawing on compelling material including Churchill’s tax records, more than justifies his audit."
  Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph
• "a surprising page-turner."
  The Economist
• "Churchill as financial risk-taker, spend­thrift, debtor, reckless gambler. This book makes you wholly rethink the received wisdom about the icon."
  William Boyd, Guardian Books of the Year
• "If the revelations contained in this book about Winston Churchill’s personal finances had been common knowledge in 1940, he might not have become prime minister. For what David Lough shows in compelling detail is that the political risk-taker, who had notoriously described the disastrous Dardanelles expedition as ‘a legitimate war gamble’ was even more reckless in private than he was in his public life. "
  Piers Brendon, Literary Review
• "Lough deserves high praise for bringing together disparate sources of information and making sense of them, and so providing the first integrated account of this important aspect of Churchill’s life. He also organizes the material in an easy-to-understand way and writes beautifully. The book reads as effortlessly as a novel,..David Lough’s No More Champagne may become a classic. It will transform the way that Churchill is interpreted and understood. Any bids for the film rights? "
  The New Criterion
• "A fascinating read."
  The Times
• "fascinating…a remarkable story of flamboyant improvidence. Admirably researched and told with eloquent restraint."
  Daily Mail
• "Brilliant and compelling  …fantastic, fun and informative…the book’s real value can be found in what it reveals about Churchill…exposes the reader to completely new elements in Churchill’s thinking which have remained largely untouched by biographers and historians ."
  History Today
• "Lough draws out subtle private meaning from scrutinised private means, eventually accounting for the statesman in full - colourful but constrained, idealistic but enmeshed, a man always partway between Destiny and his bank manager. As well as being unexpected, No More Champagne is also an understated triumph of the biographer’s art - an acutely English appreciation of a great Englishman present as everything altered, a prisoner of circumstances as much as a shaper of things to come."
  Chronicles, the magazine of US culture