January 1, 1970

While in India with his regiment in the late 1890s, Churchill had read voraciously; making up for his lack of university education, he devoured works by Plato, Adam Smith, Darwin – and Gibbon and Macauley.

But Shakespeare and the Bible were also key influences and phrasing and words evocative of both can be seen in his speeches and in his writing.

Churchill had a prodigious memory, demonstrated not only by his memorising of speeches (although he never spoke without speech notes after he ‘dried up’ early in his career) but also by his learning of lines of poetry; as a child, he’d won a prize at Harrow for memorising 1200 lines of Macauley’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’.

As an adult he memorised Shakespeare; the actor Richard Burton recounts in this interview with Michael Parkinson how he once had to ‘duet’ with Churchill when he played Hamlet on stage.

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Richard Burton reads an extract from Churchill’s ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech here, in the same interview.