Six Minutes in May

History books should give us insight and information, surprise and entertainment, and allow us to see the world, an incident or a character differently. Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May delivers in abundance. – Anthony Sattin * Observer, Best Books of 2017 *Unputdownable… Us[es] new evidence with a novelist’s feeling for personality and atmosphere – John Gray * Guardian, Best Books of 2017 *Of the abundant new books on the Second World War, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May…takes the prize. The familiar story of how Churchill unexpectedly became prime minister in 1940 has never been told so amusingly, nor in such detail – Simon Heffer * Daily Telegraph, Best History Books of 2017 *Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister…is as gripping as a novel. Apart from being meticulously researched, thoroughly original and beautifully written, the book is an important reminder of the fact that the direction of history can change in a heartbeat – Peter Frankopan * History Today, Best History Books of 2017 *An eloquent study in how quickly the political landscape can change – and history with it * The Economist, Books of the Year 2017 *A superbly written drama… Shakespeare’s research is thorough and he has a novelist’s flair for depicting the characters and motives of great and lesser men…Fascinating. – Book of the Week * The Times *Shakespeare brings both meticulous research and fictional artistry to illuminate the machinery of government under extreme stress and the abrasive conflict of large, self-confident personalities. It’s a superb achievement. – Ian McEwanRiveting…never less than gripping. But the real delight of its book is the convincing, and often revelatory, portraits of the main protagonists. * Evening Standard. *Brilliant, meticulous…This scintillating joy of a book — with a military narrative of British shame as well handled as William Dalrymple’s Return of a King, and a treatment of 20th-century British politics, romance, humiliation and desire as grandly realised as Anthony Powell’s great novel sequence….Shakespeare’s narrative is not just more reliable than Churchill’s, but more fun. * Spectator *Superb: far and away the best account of the moment which changed our national life and the world, and filled with extraordinary new details. Shakespeare brings a novelist’s eye to the characters he writes about, but it is the extraordinary way he marshals his material, far more extensive than I’ve come across before, which makes this book quite simply magnificent. – John Simpson

Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in Asia and South America. One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 1993, and considered by the Wall Street Journal as ‘one of the best English novelists of our time’, his prize-winning books have been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Inheritance, Priscilla, Six Minutes in May and acclaimed biographies of Bruce Chatwin and Ian Fleming. His most recent thriller featuring John Dyer was The Sandpit. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.