Richard Vinen at Literary Review:
It was during the 1930s that Chartwell mattered most. Churchill was out of office. He had a flat in London but no official residence and, for much of the time, no particular reason to be in the capital. Chartwell was not, though, a retreat from the world. It was a kind of factory, filled with secretaries and research assistants who hammered Churchill’s literary and political productions into shape. It was also a meeting place – close enough to London for people to come down for lunch, dinner or an evening of conspiracy. It was, to a large extent, at Chartwell that Churchill plotted his political campaigns of the decade. Two of these were misguided. He sought to resist the limited reforms that the Baldwin government proposed to British rule in India and to defend Edward VIII during the crisis that sprang from the king’s insistence on marrying an American divorcée. Another campaign he led from there – against the appeasement of Nazi Germany and in favour of British rearmament – would, in retrospect, be seen as the most important in interwar British politics.
Churchill still had the best address book in Europe. Officials and ministers talked to him and sometimes provided him with confidential information.
more here.
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