Persistence and Change in Churchill’s Mythic Memory

Abstract

This chapter explores Churchill’s various afterlives as a figure in the popular media taking the field of ‘the popular’ as a site where different Churchills jostle for pre-eminence. In this sense it works with the idea of ‘dead body politics’. The emphasis falls on the various competing figures of Churchill which reverberated through popular life in the second half of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first across a range of different genres of popular media: at the imagining of Churchill as ‘Great Man’ and from a competing perspective those interventions which sought to dismantle the association of Churchill and ‘greatness’. The chapter finally considers the relations between these remembered Churchills and the continuing significance of the monarchy in British life.