The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill

PREAMBLE

THE LION AT BAY

The French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back towards the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.

Behind them lay the sea.

It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone. If the Germans crossed the Channel and established uncontested beachheads, all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops. In A.D. 61, Queen Boudicca of the Iceni rallied the tribes of East Anglia and routed the Romans at Colchester, Saint Albans, and London (then Londinium), cutting the Ninth Legion to pieces and killing seventy thousand. But because the nature of the southern terrain was unsuitable for the construction of strongpoints, new legions under Paulinus, arriving from Gaul, crushed the revolt, leaving the grief-stricken queen to die by her own hand.

Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for ‘hard and heavy ridings.’ Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Gracie Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw – all of them manned by civilian volunteers: English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.

Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge. These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Most of their leaders, and most of the press remained craven. It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mould which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.

England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendour in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honour, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who would create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become. Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people – a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was ‘equally good to live or to die’ – who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

In London there was such a man.

Now at last, at last, his hour had struck. He had been waiting in Parliament for forty years, had grown bald and grey in his nation’s service, had endured slander and calumny only to be summoned when the situation seemed hopeless to everyone except him. His youngest daughter, seventeen-year-old ‘Mary the Mouse’ – her family nickname – had been sunning herself at Chartwell, their country home in Kent, during the first hours of the German breakthrough, when the music on her portable radio had been interrupted by a BBC bulletin: ‘His Majesty the King has sent for Mr Winston Churchill and asked him to form a government.’ Mary, who adored her father, prayed for him and assumed that he would save England. So, of course, did he. But among those who fully grasped the country’s plight, that was a minority view. The Conservative party leadership, the men of Munich, soil controlled the Government – Lord Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson, Sir Kingsley Wood, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, and, of course, Churchill’s predecessor as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who detested him and everything he represented. Even George VI hadn’t wanted Chamberlain to quit No. 10 Downing Street; he thought his treatment had been ‘grossly unfair.’ The King suggested Halifax as his successor. Labour’s erratic Stafford Cripps had already come out for Halifax. That suited the Tory hierarchy, but only a coalition could govern the nation, and the National Executive of the Labour party, meeting in a basement room of the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth, sent word that they would serve under no Conservative except Churchill. So Chamberlain persuaded the reluctant King to choose the man neither wanted.

Not that it seemed to matter much. Churchill had said that ‘the Germans are always either at your throat or at your feet,’ and as a hot May melted into a hotter June it appeared that their stranglehold was now unbreakable. Hitler was master of Europe. No one, not even Caesar, had stood so securely upon so guttering a pinnacle. The Führer told Göring: ‘The war is finished. I’ll come to an understanding with England.’ On May 28, the first day of the Dunkirk evacuation, Halifax, speaking for the Conservative leadership, had told Churchill that a negotiated peace was England’s only alternative. Now, as the new prime minister’s foreign secretary and a member of his War Cabinet, the Yorkshire noblemen was quoted by the United Press as inviting ‘Chancellor Hitler to make a new and more generous peace offer.’ It was, he said, the only reasonable course, the only decision a stable man of sound judgement could reach.

He was quite right. But Winston Churchill was not a reasonable man. He was about as sound as the Maid of Orleans, a comparison he himself once made – ‘It’s when I’m Joan of Arc that I get excited.’ Even more he was an Elijah, an Isaiah; a prophet. Deep insight, not stability, was his forte. To the War Cabinet he said, ‘I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with that man,’ and concluded: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’ He spoke to them, to the House, and then to the English people as no one had before or ever would again. He said: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ Another politician might have told them; ‘Our policy is to continue the struggle; all our forces and resources will be mobilized.’ This is what Churchill said:

Now, fired by the conviction which could only belong to one who had faced down inner despair, Churchill defied the ‘celestial grins’ of Britain’s enemies, said peace feelers would ‘be viewed with the greatest disfavour by me,’ and said he contemplated the future ‘with stern and tranquil gaze.’ Free Englishmen, he told his people, would be more than a match for the ‘deadly, drilled, docile, brutish mass of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.’ But he warned his family to prepare for invaders. His son’s bride Pamela protested: ‘But Papa, what can I do?’ He growled: ‘You can always get a carving knife from the kitchen and take one with you, can’t you?’ To the demoralized French he declared: ‘Whatever you may do, we shall fight on forever and ever and ever.’ General Maxime Weygand replied by asking what would happen if a hundred Nazi divisions landed at Dover. Churchill told him: ‘Nous les frapperons sur la tête’– they would be hit on the head as they crawled ashore. Visiting Harrow, he heard the boys sing an old school song rewritten in his honour:

He suggested a change. ‘Darker,’ he said, should be ‘sterner.’ These were no dark days, he told them. Indeed, they would be remembered as great days, provided this ‘island race’ followed his watchword: ‘Never, never, never, never give in.’

And so he saved Western civilization when men considered its redemption worth any price. The Nazi stain was spreading into the Balkans, into the Middle East, into Brazil; the German-American Bund was staging mass rallies in Madison Square Garden; the New York Times reported in front-page headlines: URUGUAY ON GUARD FOR FIFTH COLUMN, NAZIS TAKE BOLD TONE IN ECUADOR, and ARGENTINE NAZIS RALLY. Men who think of themselves as indispensable are almost always wrong, but Winston Churchill was surely that then. He was like the lion in Revelation, ‘the first beast,’ with ‘six wings about him’ and ‘full of eyes within.’ In an uncharacteristically modest moment on his eightieth birthday he said: ‘It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart; I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.’ It wasn’t that simple. The spirit, if indeed within them, lay dormant until he became prime minister and they, kindled by his soaring prose, came to see themselves as he saw them and emerged a people transformed, the admiration of free men everywhere.

At the height of the Battle of Britain, when Hitler tried to win in the air over London what he had expected to gain in a negotiated peace, the prime minister’s headquarters lay in a drab brick bunker two blocks south of Downing Street, beneath a stone government building which bears the plaque CABINET OFFICE/CENTRAL STATISTICAL OFFICE. The bunker is still there – nothing in it, not even the pins in the maps, has been changed since V-E Day – and you can descend a cellar stair into the past, emerging into what was known as ‘the Annexe,’ or ‘the CWR,’ short for ‘Cabinet War Room.’ In fact there are many rooms, including a rather barren cell containing a desk bearing the microphone which the prime minister used for his broadcasts and the bed into which his wife could tuck him at night. All messages reached him here through the No 10 switchboard; an aide could be put through anywhere in England by dialling the magic number: Rapid Falls 4466.

Churchill hated the Annexe’s cramped quarters. Donning his zippered blue Siren Suit, as he called it (it looked like a workman’s boiler suit; the staff called it his ‘Rompers’), he would mount the stairs to visit his family in their ground-floor flat, or stroll over to No. 10, or cross the street into St James’s Park to feed the ducks and pelicans in the lake despite reports, taken seriously, that German agents lurked there. At night he was even more incautious. During raids he would dart out after close hits to see the damage. Sometimes he climbed up to the roof and squatted there on a hot-air vent, counting the Heinkel IIIs as the searchlights picked them up. He wanted to be wherever the bombs were falling. It is a lie that he knew Coventry would be destroyed on November 14, 1940, and didn’t alert the city because the Germans would have known their code had been broken. Sir John Martin was with him that evening. They were driving out of the capital when a motorcyclist stopped them; word had just arrived that the Luftwaffe was headed for London. So the prime minister ordered the car turned around. It was early morning before he knew that the real target had been Coventry.

All his life he was a man of extraordinary personal courage. As a youth he sought danger in Cuba, on India’s North-West Frontier, on the Nile, and in South Africa. Each battle found him recklessly exposing himself to gunfire. In the Sudan in 1898 he was a subaltern and Herbert Kitchener was Anglo-Egyptian commander in chief (Sirdar), but he attacked Kitchener, in print, for ‘the inhuman slaughter of the wounded’ and the desecration of the tomb of the Mahdi, the natives’ idol. Then, in Natal, the Boers captured Churchill. He escaped and later rode a bicycle in civilian clothes through the Boer stronghold of Johannesburg, risking execution as a spy had he been caught. Elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he defended the enemy in his maiden speech – and then savaged Britain’s war minister, a senior statesman of his own party. At sea in 1943 he awoke Averell Harriman to tell him that a U-boat had them in its sights. He said: ‘I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.’ After a moment’s thought he added: ‘It might not be so nice if one were in the water and they tried to pick me up.’ Harriman, frightened, said, ‘I thought you told me that the worst a torpedo could do to this ship . . . was to knock out one engine room.’ Churchill grinned and replied, ‘Ah, but they might put two torpedoes in us. You must come with me . . . and see the fun.’

The harder question is whether he enjoyed war too much. He denied it. He called it a ‘dirty, shoddy business, . . . disguise it as you may.’ On September 4, 1898, after he had survived the dreadful battle of Omdurman on the Nile, he wrote his mother that the scenes he had witnessed ‘made me anxious and worried during the night and I speculated on the shoddiness of war. You cannot gild it. The raw comes through.’ At Tehran in 1943 he said to his daughter Sarah: ‘War is a game played with a smiling face, but do you think there is laughter in my heart?’ And he said: ‘War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt.’

But this assumes that there was something magnificent to spoil. The implication is ineluctable: he saw chivalric, Arthurian, brioso aspects of war; it was to him, as life was to Peter Pan, ‘an awfully big adventure.’ As a young war correspondent he reported the death of a young peer in battle as ‘a sad item, for which the only consolation is that the Empire is worth the blood of the noblest of its citizens.’ In 1914, the diarist Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s mistress, noted that the outbreak of war found the British cabinet sunk in gloom, whereupon ‘in burst Churchill, radiant, smiling, a cigar in his mouth and satisfaction upon his face. “Well!” he exclaimed, “the deed is done!”’ Lloyd George, who was also there, told Margot Asquith that ‘Winston was radiant, his face bright, his manner keen . . . You could see he was a really happy man,’ and Churchill himself wrote his wife: ‘I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built up like that?’ During World War II he liked to cap his day by watching captured German combat films. After the second Quebec conference in 1944 he told the press that he would visit the battlefronts soon because he did not wish to miss any of the ‘fun’ of ‘the good things.’ The New Statesman acidly commented that these were ‘strange words for a process whereby human beings are being disembowelled, roasted to death, drowned, blown into fragments, or are dying slowly of agonizing wounds.’ But the prime minister was unchastened. Six months later he stood on Xanten hilltop, watching British regiments cross the Rhine. The spectacle, he complained, was insufficiently dramatic. He said: ‘I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge.’

Red coats, which the army had doffed for khaki in the late 1890s, obviously belonged to the wars of earlier times. But so did he. He liked panoply, bugles, drums, battle flags, British squares. He said: ‘It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunistic march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns.’ At times he believed it a shame that technology had altered peace, too. ‘In the nineteenth century,’ he observed, ‘Jules Verne wrote Round the World in Eighty Days. It seemed a prodigy. Now you can get around it in four, but you do not see much of it on the way.’ He thought that ‘the substitution of the internal combustion machine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind’ and that it was ‘arguable whether the human race have been the gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine.’ The real point here was that steam had opened up the British Empire; air power, and then the atom, had closed it down. Lord Moran, his physician, wrote that ‘Winston is a proud man, and it hurts him to think how vulnerable, in the atomic age, a small, densely populated island like Britain has become.’ It was to Moran that Churchill said glumly: ‘I wish flying had never been invented. The world has shrunk since the Wrights got into the air; it was an evil hour for poor England.’ And addressing England as though it were a colleague – he was apt to do this – he said: ‘You came into big things as an accident of naval power when you were an island. The world had confidence in you. You became the workshop of the world. You populated the island beyond its capacity. Through an accident of airpower you will probably cease to exist.’

In a thousand little ways he revealed his preference for the past and his reluctance to part with it. Victorian expressions salted his speech: ‘I venture to say,’ ‘I am greatly distressed,’ ‘I rejoice,’ and ‘I pray’; so many of his memos began ‘Pray do,’ ‘Pray do not,’ or ‘Pray give me the facts on half a sheet of paper’ that they became known among his staff as ‘Churchill’s prayers.’ If it was time to leave Chartwell for London, and he wanted to know if his chauffeur was behind the wheel, he would ask: ‘Is the coachman on his box?’ After the House of Commons snuffbox was destroyed in the Blitz, he replaced it with one from his family’s ancestral home of Blenheim, explaining, ‘I confess myself to be a great admirer of tradition.’ He frankly preferred ‘the refinements of Louis XIV to the modern ‘age of clatter and buzz, of gape and gloat.’ He also thought that ‘bad luck always pursues peoples who change the names of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the customs of the past.’ Accordingly, Istanbul was Constantinople to him; Ankara was Angora; Sevastopol was Sebastopol; and in a directive to his minister of information dated August 29, 1941, he wrote: ‘Do try to blend in without causing trouble the word Persia instead of Iran.’ As for Cambodia and Guatemala, they didn’t exist for him; he had got this far without having heard of them and saw no need to change now. He spoke of Sir Walter Raleigh, Henry VIII, and James I as though they were his contemporaries. Anthony Montague Browne recalls walking into Churchill’s office after Harold Macmillan had been chosen over R.A. (‘Rab’) Butler as the new Conservative leader. Churchill was muttering, ‘Intelligent, yes. Good looking, yes. Well-meaning, yes. But not the stuff of which Prime Ministers are made.’ Montague Browne asked: ‘But would Rab have been any better?’ Churchill looked at him blankly. He said: ‘I was thinking of Melbourne.’

Like Melbourne and all other Victorian prime ministers, Churchill never attended Parliament, or called at Buckingham Palace, wearing anything but a frock coat. It was sometimes difficult for those around him to remember that he had fought his first election in the nineteenth century and had been, by the time of the old Queen’s death, one of the highest paid newspaper reporters in the world. Some thought his viewpoint and attitudes reached even farther back in history; Harold Laski called him ‘a gallant and romantic relic of eighteenth-century imperialism.’ Churchill replied: ‘I like to live in the past. I don’t think people are going to get much fun in the future.’ The older he grew, the stronger the bond he felt between himself and others who had reached manhood before the turn of the century. When he was told that a Londoner over seventy-five years of age had been arrested in Hyde Park for making improper advances towards a young girl in subzero weather, he chorded: ‘Over seventy-five and below zero! Makes you proud to be an Englishman!’

But to those who chided him for being preoccupied with earlier ages, he answered: ‘The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward. This is not a philosophical or political argument – any oculist can tell you it is true.’ Certainly it was true of him. He was no mere fogy. Clement Attlee, his great Labour adversary, compared him to a layer cake; ‘One layer was certainly seventeenth century. The eighteenth century in him is obvious. There was the nineteenth century, and a large slice, of course, of the twentieth century; and another, curious, layer which may possibly have been the twenty-first.’ Churchill may have lacked sympathy for inventive contributions to warfare, but he understood them and even anticipated them. In World War I he was the father of the tank. As early as 1917 he conceived of vessels which would serve as landing craft for tanks. In the late 1930s he became interested in rockets and showed friends graphs illustrating their ballistic characteristics. And in the war against Hitler his genius was responsible for ‘Window,’ strips of tinfoil dropped by bombers to confuse enemy radar; ‘Pluto,’ a pipeline under the ocean; ‘Gee,’ a device for guiding pilots; and the artificial harbours used at Normandy.

All these, of course, were weapons. Martial strains reverberated throughout his career as a kind of background score. In the House his rhetorical metaphors were those of the battlefield – events marched, political flanks were turned, legislative skirmishes fought, ultimata delivered, and opponents told to surrender, to strike their colours, to lay down their arms. More than half of the fifty-six books he published were about war and warriors; the two he most regretted not having found time to write were biographies of Caesar and Napoleon. Partly this was because he knew that peace hath not her heroes, and he meant to be heroic. In part it was because of his combative spirit. He agreed with George Meredith: ‘It is a terrific decree in life that they must act who would prevail.’ There is no doubt that he enjoyed peril and delighted in battle. In his last days he said that 1940 and 1941 had been the best years of his life, despite the fact that for other Englishmen they had been incomparably the worst.

It is equally true that throughout his life he retained the small boy’s glee in making mischief, in dressing up, in showing off. He was probably the only man in London who owned more hats than his wife – top hats, Stetsons, seamen’s caps, his hussar helmet, a privy councillor’s cocked hat, homburgs, an astrakhan, an Irish ‘paddy hat,’ a white pith helmet, an Australian bush hat, a fez, the huge beplumed hat he wore as a Knight of the Garter, even the full headdress of a North American Indian chieftain. He had closets full of costumes. When his grandchildren visited him, he appeared as an ape, snarling. Dressing for dinner when he travelled abroad, he wore the decorations awarded him by whatever country he was visiting – his favourite was the Danish Order of the Elephant – together with his sash. If nothing else was suitable, he would don his uniforms as RAF air commodore, as colonel of the Queen’s Own Fourth Hussars, as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, or as Elder Brother of Trinity House, England’s first lighthouse and pilotage authority, chartered by Henry VIII in 1514. His fame had eclipsed the medals; his figure had outgrown the uniforms; it didn’t matter. Once in Strasbourg Lord Boothby entered wearing a Legion d’Honneur rosette. Churchill glared, pointed at it, and demanded: ‘What’s that in your buttonhole?’ Told, he scowled, then brightened. ‘I’ve got something better than that,’ he said. He disappeared and reappeared, proudly wearing the médaille militaire.

In the House he expressed this side of himself by thumbing his nose at the Opposition, or sticking out his tongue, or, when he had enraged them and they looked apoplectic, by blowing them a kiss. He once wrote of his childhood that he had been ‘so happy in my nursery with all my toys.’ He still was; the imp lurked within. As home secretary before World War I he refused to prohibit roller-skating on sidewalks; pedestrians might be bowled over, but boys must not be deprived of their fun. Once during World War II, vacationing in Florida, he disguised himself as ‘a Mr Lobb, an invalid requiring quiet.’ His principal private secretary, Sir John Martin, was registered as the invalid’s butler. Security officers, after thinking it over, encouraged the prime minister to use pseudonyms when phoning. So he used Martin’s name, with the consequence, Sir John wryly recalls, that ‘I received a rocket from Censorship.’ Despairing, the security men begged Churchill at least to keep his movements secret. He then telephoned Franklin Roosevelt before a Washington summit meeting: They won’t let me tell you how I’m going to travel. You know security measures. So all I can say is that I’m coming by puff-puff. Got it? Puff-puff.’ Once during the height of the Blitz, Mrs Kathleen Hill, one of the prime minister’s secretaries, was visited by her son Richard, an army private on leave. She sent him out on a personal errand for the prime minister – buying an electric train for his first grandson. Hill had just finished assembling it on the rug of a first-floor room at No. 10 when he became aware of an august presence hovering over him. ‘You’ve got two locomotives,’ Churchill rumbled. ‘Have you got two transformers?’ Private Hill nodded dumbly. ‘Good!’ boomed Churchill, clapping his hands together. ‘Let’s have a crash!’

That, too, was a pan of him, but to leave it there would be to trivialize him. On a deeper level his aggressive, let’s-have-a-crash manner was rooted in his vision of statesmanship. That vision is difficult to grasp today. It is wholly at odds with a central doctrine of his contemporaries, sanctified by the conventional wisdom of generations since. They hold that peace is the norm and war a primitive aberration, Churchill held otherwise. As a youth he concluded that the great issues of his time would be decided on the battlefield, that Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Gobineau had been right: that war was a legitimate political instrument, that it was by no means the worst that could happen; that conflict, not amity, would be the customary relationship between great states. He reconciled himself to it – as did Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and the Zionists – and began a lifelong study of strategy.

Although he was diametrically opposed to the prevailing attitudes in Western Europe and the United States, it is arguable that events have vindicated him. In this century every world power has been engulfed by war in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Latin America has not known a year of silent guns. Australia was threatened by Japanese invasion. Indians have fought Pakistanis, Arabs have fought Israelis, Danes and Norwegians have fought Germans; Spaniards have fought Spaniards and Burmese, Burmese. Emerging nations have acquired independence only to cross the frontiers of their newly independent neighbours. Cuba became a missile base, then a port serving Soviet submarines. Even the remote, barren Falkland Islands saw Britons and Argentinians slay one another. The United States has seen no fighting on its mainland, but American soldiers and airmen have died in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Sicily, Italy, North Africa, China, the Pacific islands, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and US warships lie rusting on the bottom of every ocean. Russia and the West are locked in a truce of terror held in check only by the fear of mutual annihilation.

Having accepted what was unacceptable to others, Churchill devoted his remarkable gifts to martial arts at an early age. His aim was always victory, but victory at the least possible cost in suffering, at the lowest price in casualties. The proper course for Britain, he reasoned, was to follow the principle of Chatham – the Elder Pitt – and hold continental enemies in the grip of English sea power, sapping their strength at the distant fringes of their dominions. In 1915 this led to the most controversial, most misunderstood decision of Churchill’s career. He meant to break the stalemate in France by forcing the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean which separates Europe and Asia, knocking Turkey out of the war and joining British and French forces with their Russian ally. Because of blunders in the field, the stratagem failed. That failure, which drove him from office and nearly ended his career, haunted him all his years. Today the wisdom of his plan then is obvious. ‘In the whole of the First World War,’ Attlee has written, there was ‘only one brilliant strategical idea – and that was Winston’s: the Dardanelles.’

Still, in the age of nuclear weapons, which Churchill did not anticipate, even the most humane of warriors is suspect. The London Observer declared in 1951: ‘Any consideration of Mr Churchill’s career as a whole brings one up against the extraordinary fact that, for all its majestic scope, it remains to this day tragically unfulfilled and fragmentary. His political role has not been meteoric and disastrous, like Napoleon’s or Hitler’s. But neither has it been linked to a definite achievement, like Richelieu’s or Chatham’s, Washington’s or Lincoln’s, Bismarck’s or Lenin’s.’ An American is struck by the facility with which so many British intellectuals slight the man who saved their country. In fact, Churchill was more than an exponent of Mars. His ultimate goal was the ‘broad, sunlit uplands’ of a time when all swords became ploughshares. Even in the grim days after Dunkirk he looked westward and saw hope. If the British Isles were conquered by the Germans, he said, then the struggle would continue abroad ‘until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.’ He had faith in eventual peace, and he believed he knew how it could be achieved: by combining the might of the English-speaking peoples in so strong a defence of the United States and the Commonwealth that the rest of the world would be held at bay, as it had been held by the British Empire in the relatively quiescent nineteenth century. Then, from that absolute base, freedom would expand outward. He cherished the possibility of a world order, a kind of Renaissance pageant to be accomplished, not by emerging states squabbling on United Nations Plaza in Manhattan, but by the Americans and the great powers of Europe, including Germany but not, significantly, the Russians, whom he ‘always looked on,’ in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s words, ‘as a formless, quasi-Asiatic mass.’ His dreams of a tranquil global civilization in many ways resembled the exotic mysticism of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, and Joseph Chamberlain, but they never turned westward. To Churchill, the ‘Great Republic,’ as he called it, was the key. This, as he readily acknowledged, was partly because of his origins. The blood in his veins was as American as English. His mother was a New Yorker. He always kept a cast of her hand, moulded in copper, on his desk. It was an exact replica of his own.

He adored her and she neglected him. He later wrote: ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly – but at a distance.’ She later told friends she ignored Winston until he grew older and became ‘interesting.’ That was an improvement on the attitude of her husband, who didn’t even like his son, but young Winston’s happiness among his nursery toys derived from neither parent but from his nanny, Elizabeth Everest – ‘Woom.’ He recalled: ‘My nurse was my confidante. . . . [At her death she was] my dearest and most intimate friend.’ Wrenched from her while still a child, he was sent to a brutal boarding school in Ascot, where the sadistic headmaster caned him until his back was a mass of welts. His treatment at the hands of the other boys was, if anything, worse. Towards the end of his life, in halting tones, he told his doctor about it. Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby wood. This was hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made. His only weapons were an unconquerable will and an incipient sense of immortality. Already he was memorising Macaulay’s tale of a man with two comrades barring a bridge to an army:

Beginning at the age of seven, Churchill deliberately set out to change his nature, to prove that biology need not be destiny. Anthony Storr, the English psychiatrist and author of Human Aggression, concludes that he ‘was, to a marked extent, forcing himself to go against his own inner nature.’ As a Victorian, Churchill believed he could be master of his fate, and that faith sustained him, but everything we have learned about human motivation since then underscores the immensity of his undertaking. W. H. Sheldon has delineated three dominant physiques, each with its concomitant personality traits. Of the three – ectomorphic (slight), mesomorphic (muscular), and endomorphic (fat) – Churchill clearly fell in the third category. His head was ponderous, his limbs small, his belly tumescent, his chest puny. His skin was so sensitive that he broke into a rash unless he slept naked at night between silk sheets. By day he could wear only silk underwear against his skin. Endomorphs are characteristically lazy, calculating, easygoing, and predictable. Churchill was none of these. He altered his emotional constitution to that of an athlete, projecting the image of a valiant, indomitable bulldog.

At times along the way he despaired. In 1893 he wrote, ‘I am cursed with so feeble a body, that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.’ Yet he was determined to prove just as hardy as any mesomorph. In his teens he nearly killed himself while leaping from a bridge during a game of tag; he pitched down almost thirty feet and lay unconscious for three days. He fell again steeplechasing at Aldershot, and yet again when disembarking at Bombay, where he permanently injured a shoulder; for the rest of his active life he played polo, off and on, with his arm bound to his side. As a child he caught pneumonia. He suffered from chest ailments the rest of his life. He was allergic to anaesthetics and periodically erupted in boils. Nevertheless, he refused to yield to human frailty. In his inner world there was no room for concessions to weakness. He never complained of fatigue. In his seventieth year he flew to councils of war overseas sprawled across a tick mattress on the floor of an unheated World War II bomber. During the ten years after V-E Day he suffered a heart attack, three bouts of pneumonia, two strokes, and two operations. Nevertheless, he continued to build the image of a tireless embodiment of machismo who ate, smoked, and drank, all to excess. It survives to this day. Actually, most of the stories about his alcohol intake are myth. It is true that he started each day with a scotch and soda. What is not generally known is that he made that drink last until lunch, and that the amount of liquor he put away over a twenty-four-hour day was surprisingly modest. You would never have known it to hear him talk. He wanted to be remembered as a two-bottle man, like Pitt, and he cultivated the yams about his drinking with characteristic aplomb. Once he asked Frederick Lindemann – ‘the Prof,’ a scientific wizard who later became Lord Cherwell – how many boxcars could be filled with the champagne he had drunk in his lifetime. The Prof replied: ‘Only part of one.’ Churchill sighed. He said: ‘So little time and so much to achieve.’

In his most famous photograph he is seen glaring at the camera, his jaw jutting like the butt end of a ham, the incarnation of defiant Britain. The Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, who understood him, caught the expression by a trick. Just before he triggered the shutter, he reached out and yanked Churchill’s cigar from his mouth. What you really see in that picture is an endomorph rudely deprived of his pacifier. If you look closely, however, you may catch a glimpse of something else: a man ruled by his instincts. In triumphing over his physiognomy Churchill had become an aggressive extrovert, but at the same time he had developed into a rare type – C. G. Jung called it the ‘extroverted intuitive’ – and it was that, not his surface toughness, which changed the history of the world. Jung wrote: ‘The intuitive is never to be found among the generally recognized reality values, but is always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud, pregnant with future promise . . . Thinking and feeling, the indispensable components of conviction, are, with him, inferior functions, possessing no decisive weight: hence they lack the power to offer any lasting resistance to the force of intuition.’ That, or something like it, was what C. P. Snow had in mind when he wrote: ‘Judgement is a fine thing: but it is not all that uncommon. Deep insight is much rarer. Churchill had flashes of that kind of insight. . . . When Hitler came to power Churchill did not use judgement but one of his deep insights . . . That was what we needed . . . Plenty of people on the left could see the danger; but they did not know how the country had to be seized and unified.’ The answer was found by an extroverted intuitive. In Jung’s description of the type, ‘his capacity to inspire his fellow-men with courage, or to kindle enthusiasm for something new, is unrivalled.’ Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Churchill’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, was constantly astonished by his ‘method of suddenly arriving at some decision as it were by intuition, without any kind of logical examination of the problem. . . . He preferred to work by intuition and by impulse.’ Jan Christiaan Smuts said: ‘That is why Winston is indispensable.’ A colleague described it as his ‘zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.’

Political genius, said Bismarck, consists of hearing the distant hoofbeat of the horse of history and leaping to catch the passing horseman by the coattails. The difficulty is that one may hear the wrong horse, or lunge for the wrong horseman. As Jung pointed out, the extroverted intuitive lacks judgement. Churchill was right about the Dardanelles, right about Ireland, right about Munich, right about stripping England of tanks to defend the Suez Canal in 1940, and, as the Third Reich crumbled, supremely right about the menace of the rising Russian empire in Eastern Europe. However, he had not been right about fascism; at first, his conservative instincts and his allegiance to tradition had led him to apologias for strong men who posed as defenders of the established order. In 1926 he told Italian journalists that he had been ‘charmed . . . by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing.’ Resisting British opposition to Franco, he recommended instead that England ‘send charitable aid under the Red Cross to both sides.’ And while loathing Nazism, he once remarked that he ‘admired’ Hitler for being a ‘champion’ of his nation’s pride. As his friend F. E. Smith put it, ‘Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God.’

Despite his versatility, vitality, and fertile mind, his belligerent instincts led him to fight Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence, to oppose the abdication of Edward VIII, and, in the heat of the 1945 political campaign, to predict that a Labour party victory would bring Britain ‘a Gestapo apparatus.’ In January 1938 he wrote: ‘The air menace against properly armed and protected ships of war will not be of a decisive character.’ This conviction, stubbornly held, led to the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Twenty-second Japanese Air Flotilla on December 10, 1941. In the opening months of the war, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, he was responsible for England’s intervention in Norway, a fiasco which was mercifully overlooked when he became prime minister. Anzio was his idea; later he admitted that ‘I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but ail we got was a stranded whale.’ Diversionary attacks, however impractical, always had his support. Late in the war he still wanted to land in Norway. At his insistence amphibious assaults were attempted on Rhodes and other Greek islands. All failed. In 1944 he even wanted to seize the tip of Sumatra, which was wholly without strategic value. George C. Marshall said, ‘His planning was all wishing and guessing.’ Actually, it wasn’t. Had the combined chiefs adopted his grand proposal to sail up the Adriatic and invade Europe through the Ljubljana Gap, some military historians believe, British Tommies and American GIs, not Russians, would have been the liberators of Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw, with all that would have entailed for the postwar world. But by then his stock had fallen because he had championed so many impractical schemes.

That had been the story of much of his public life. His career passed through three stages: from 1900 to 1915, when his star rose to a dizzy height; from then until 1940, when he achieved little and failed often; and from Dunkirk to the end, when he became a legend. The legend obscures what was a patchy record. Again and again he was rejected by his countrymen; he never won their love and confidence until they faced disaster. His following was limited to a few personal friends. He lost more elections than any other British politician of his time. Twice he switched parties, and although he wound up leader of the Conservatives, he spent three-quarters of his political life battling Tory leaders. His brilliance was recognized from the first, but he was regarded as erratic, unreliable, shallow, impetuous, a hatcher of ‘wildcat schemes.’ In 1915, Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith observed of Churchill that ‘to speak with the tongue of men and angels, and to spend laborious days and nights in administration, is no good if a man does not inspire trust.’ Instead, he inspired suspicion. His love of adventure, it was said, ran away with his discretion. He was put down as an opportunist, a swashbuckler, a man who was ‘jaywalking through life.’ He was labelled a man incapable of party loyalty. In the House of Commons he wasn’t even a good listener; he ‘lacked antennae.’ Once his mind was set, he wouldn’t budge an inch. Nor could he judge men. He was easily taken in by quacks and charlatans; in the words of Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, ‘Winston was a bad picker.’ By the 1930s it was generally felt that the people were wise to him at last, that he was a figure from the past, out of touch with reality. A newspaper editorial described him as a ‘genius without judgement.’ Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who watched Germany rearm and crushed all proposals for British military expenditures, said that although Churchill had a ‘hundred-horsepower brain,’ he didn’t know how to harness it. Harold Begbie wrote: ‘Mr Churchill carries great guns, but his navigation is uncertain. His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him but do not follow him. He beguiles their reason but never warms their emotions.’

Margot Asquith had sized him up in 1908 as a man of ‘transitory convictions.’ Later, the Tories reached the same conclusion; they accused him of inconstancy, of veering opinions. In fact, it was the other way round. It was Baldwin and Chamberlain who were the trimmers, switching their policies when public opinion shifted. Except in the 1920s – when, as Baldwin’s chancellor of the Exchequer, he withheld criticism of some questionable policies – Churchill never changed at all. He could misjudge others, but his own principles were a rock. This, in fact, is what offended traditional party politicians. If one reads the letters he wrote as a subaltern, his dispatches as a war correspondent, his speeches as a young MP, his cabinet papers, his books, and his ‘Action-This-Day’ memoirs of the early 1940s, it will be clear that his views, once formed, were immutable. Here and there one encounters surprises. In the Edwardian era he and David Lloyd George were the most effective champions of the working class in the cabinet. Churchill’s sympathy for workmen had been engaged by the humble circumstances of Mrs Everest, who had given him the love his mother withheld, and by reading early sociological studies of the desperate poverty in the lower classes. Despite his wealthy friends and relatives and his allegiance to the Empire, he denounced ‘our unbridled Imperialists who have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation, and territory.’ He invented the excess-profits tax. Yet more than thirty years later he bitterly fought Labour’s cradle-to-grave welfare legislation. The explanation is intriguing. He wasn’t opposed to the substance of Labour’s bills; what he found objectionable was the way the thing was being done. Labour held that the people had an absolute right to these comprehensive benefits. Churchill thought they should be gifts from a benign upper class to grateful lower classes. It was characteristic of him that in 1944, when Harold Laski proposed raising a fund as a token of the nation’s gratitude to him, he demurred, then added: ‘If, however, when I am dead people think of commemorating my services, I should like to think that a park was made for the children of London’s poor on the south bank of the Thames, where they have suffered so grimly from the Hun.’ Subscriptions were admirable. Taxes were an affront.

His concept of magnanimity is among his more fascinating and, if you disregard the overtones of noblesse oblige, more endearing traits. He was always being excoriated in print or on the platform, and one of his sources of income was damage suits for libel or slander. He always won, and he always felt genuine pity for the loser. He wrote: ‘I have always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main till overwhelming victory, and then offering the hand of friendship to the vanquished. Thus I have always been against the Pacifists during the quarrel, and against the Jingoes at its close.’ It was a pattern with him. Defeat had to precede conciliation. He refused to negotiate until his adversary had capitulated. Revenge afterwards, however, was to him unmanly and ungentlemanly. It was Kitchener’s vindictiveness on the Nile, his total lack of generosity towards the routed natives, which infuriated young Churchill, After Chamberlain’s fall, which was swiftly followed by his death, Churchill rose in the House of Commons to pay him tribute. He said Chamberlain’s hopes had been foiled by events, then asked: ‘But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? . . . They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart – the love of peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril.’ He was a ferocious enemy of Germany in both world wars, yet after each he begged the British government – in vain – to dispatch emergency shipments of food to its starving people. However high he rose, the man who as a boy had been bullied and bruised could always identify with the underdog.

In a profound sense, he himself always remained the underdog. All his life he suffered spells of depression, sinking into the brooding depths of melancholia, an emotional state which, though little understood, resembles the passing sadness of the normal man as a malignancy resembles a canker sore. The depressive knows what Dante knew: that hell is an endless, hopeless conversation with oneself. Every day he chisels his way through time, praying for relief. The etiology of the disease is complex, but is thought to include family history, childhood influences, biological deficiencies, and – particularly among those of aggressive temperament – feelings of intense hostility which the victim, lacking other targets, turns inward upon himself. Having chosen to be macho, Churchill became the pugnacious, assertive fighter ready to cock a snook at anyone who got in his way. That was why he began carrying a Bren gun in his car when he became prime minister, then took bayonet lessons, and insisted that his lifeboat on the wartime Queen Mary be equipped with a mounted machine gun. But in peacetime he often lacked adequate outlets for his aggression. The deep reservoir of vehemence he carried within him backed up, and he was plunged into fathomless gloom.

Depression is common among the great; it may balance their moods of omnipotence. Among its sufferers have been Goethe, Lincoln, Bismarck, Schumann, Tolstoy, Robert E. Lee, and Martin Luther. To these should be added Churchill’s father and five of the seven dukes of Marlborough, his ancestors, for it should be remembered that genes, too, play a depressive role. The personality traits are unmistakable; it is impossible to imagine Franklin Roosevelt offering blood, toil, tears, and sweat, but the expression would have come naturally from Lincoln. We first encounter Churchill’s awareness of his illness in a letter, written when he was twenty, complaining of ‘mental stagnation’ and a ‘slough of despond.’ The note is sounded again in his second book, a novel. The hero drops into a chair and asks himself: ‘Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant – for what?’ Later, ‘a sense of weariness, of disgust with struggling, of desire for peace filled [the hero’s] soul. The object for which he had toiled so long was now nearly attained and it seemed of little worth.’ An echo of this is heard more than a half-century later. It was Churchill’s birthday. Glasses were raised to honour his accomplishments. He muttered to his daughters Diana and Sarah: ‘I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.’

‘What a creature of strange moods he is,’ Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, wrote, ‘always at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.’ In times of disappointment, rejection, or bereavement, feelings of hopelessness overwhelmed him. Thoughts of self-destruction were never far away. He told his doctor: ‘I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.’ He also disliked sleeping near a balcony. He explained: ‘I’ve no desire to quit this world, but thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into the head.’

To a remarkable degree he coped successfully with ‘Black Dog,’ as he called his depressive spells. He sought flamboyant, stimulating, zestful company. He avoided hospitals. And like Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, he found solace in incessant activity. He told Violet Asquith that unless he was perpetually active he relapsed into ‘dark moments of impatience and frustration.’ Sir George Riddell wrote in his diary in January 1915 that Churchill ‘is one of the most industrious men I have ever known. He is like a wonderful piece of machinery with a flywheel which occasionally makes unexpected movements.’ He would tell his family, ‘A change is as good as a rest,’ and then set about laying bricks at Chartwell or painting landscapes at Marrakesh. After the Dardanelles he crossed into France, fought in the trenches as a battalion commander, and set up his easel just behind the front line. And he always pursued acclaim. Depressives, more than most people, are dependent upon external sources of self-esteem. Churchill was never bashful about soliciting applause. As a youth, mailing a manuscript to his mother, he sought from her what she had not given him in childhood. He wrote: ‘Write to me at great length about the book and be nice about it. Don’t say what you think, but what I . . . should like you to think.’ If friends suggested that this book or that speech might be improved, he reproached them: ‘You are not on my side.’ He expected total, uncritical loyalty. And he reciprocated. Brendan Bracken, one of the few who stood by him in the 1930s, said: ‘He would go to the stake for a friend.’

Nothing, however, could match the satisfaction of directing his hostility outward, towards a great antagonist, a figure worthy of massive enmity. But as the years rolled by and he approached old age, the possibilities of finding such an object became remote. The strain began to tell. Anthony Storr writes: ‘In day-to-day existence, antagonists are not wicked enough, and depressives suffer from pangs of conscience about their own hostility.’ Then Churchill’s prospects were dramatically altered. Adolf Hitler entered his life. It would be fatuous to suggest that the Nazi dictator’s only significance for Churchill was as an answer to an emotional longing. Churchill was no warmonger. He was a statesman, a humanitarian, a thinker in cosmic terms; he would have been profoundly grateful if Hitler had strangled on his own venom. But the Fuhrer’s repeated lunges across the borders of peaceful neighbouring states did arouse a Churchillian belligerence far beyond the capacity of ordinary men. His basic weakness became his basic strength. Here, at last, was pure evil, a monster who deserved no pity, a tyrant he could claw and maim without admonishment from his scruples. By provoking his titanic wrath, the challenge from central Europe released enormous stores of long-suppressed vitality within him. In the beginning Hitler responded in kind. He, too, was a hoarder of rage, and he was a great hater. He may have felt that Britain’s prime minister met an ache in him, too. As it turned out, he needed Churchill the way a murderer needs a noose.

Hitler’s archenemy was not a man of small ego. It is an egalitarian fiction that the great are modest. They haven’t any right to be, and they aren’t. He said to Attlee: ‘Of course I am an egotist. Where do you get if you aren’t?’ In 1940 he believed that he had been destined for the extraordinary role he must now play. He declared to Lord Moran: This cannot be accident, it must be design. I was kept for this job.’ It didn’t surprise him. Determined to prove himself unworthy of parental neglect, he had lived much of his life in a world of fantasy centred on the conviction that something special lay ahead for him. He wasn’t vain; merely self-centred. As a young war correspondent in the midst of combat he called to the soldiers around him: ‘Keep cool, men! This will make great copy for my paper!’ Later, he liked to lie in bed listening to recordings of his speeches. Once he and his valet had words. Afterwards Churchill rumbled: ‘You were rude.’ His manservant, forgetting his station, said, ‘You were rude, too.’ Churchill pouted. After a moment he said: ‘But I am a great man.’ His idea of a good dinner, he said, was to dine well and then ‘to discuss a good topic – with myself as chief conversationalist.’ After one meal his son, Randolph, was trying to make a point. Churchill broke in with a comment of his own. Randolph tried to pick up the thread of his argument. His father barked: ‘Don’t interrupt me when I am interrupting!’ In 1945, after the collapse of the Third Reich and his electoral defeat, he said: ‘For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.’

Some of the most moving passages in his historical accounts pay tribute to England’s common man, but he never really understood his constituents’ minds, and in fact he didn’t much care. During one campaign he described his audience as ‘a sea of hard little hats on hard little heads.’ Lloyd George, who cared very much about the voters’ dreams, was saturated with class consciousness; Churchill, as Attlee once observed, would have been content in a feudal society. He never grasped the revolution of rising expectations in the Birmingham mills and the bazaars of New Delhi. He thought Labour unfit to govern, and his early appeals for labourers’ votes were almost absurd in their condescension. (In 1900 he told them: ‘I like the British working man and so did my father before me.’) This insensitivity is one explanation for the periodic eclipse of his political fortunes. It is indeed singular that a man so remote from commonality, so completely out of touch with his times, could have become a national hero. Eventually he became beloved for his courage, his humour, his bulldog image, and such touches as his V-for-Victory sign, his ritualistic circumcision of cigars, and his deliberate mispronunciation of Nazis – it came out of the Churchill euphonium as ‘Nahrzees.’ But he never mastered the British political mood. Instead, he repeatedly misjudged it. Except in national emergencies, at the hour of fate or the crack of doom, he was largely ignored. People didn’t identify with him because he never reciprocated.

In his personal life he was the complete patrician. F. E. Smith said: ‘Winston is a man of simple tastes. He is always prepared to put up with the best of everything.’ Churchill’s wife, Clementine, told Lord Moran that at home ‘Winston is a pasha.’ If no servant responded when he clapped his hands upon entering the house, he would immediately call for his valet. The valet dressed him right down to the pulling on of his socks, and ran his bath – twice a day – almost to the brim, at a precise temperature. Churchill’s nanny had begun ministering to him; she had been succeeded by his manservants, batman, wife, secretaries, footmen, doctors, and attendants. He was inconsiderate of them; inpatient, arrogant, unfeeling. Why did they put up with it? Dr. Storr suggests that ‘men who demand and need a great deal of attention from others are manifesting a kind of childlike helplessness, which evokes an appropriate response, however difficult they may be.’ Churchill could be very difficult. When a plane was preparing to land and the NO SMOKING sign flashed on, he would light up a cigar. If he found himself driving in a traffic jam, he wheeled his car out on the shoulder or sidewalk and drove to the head of the line. He rarely travelled with fewer than sixteen pieces of matched baggage. Once, according to Vincent Sheean, he arrived by himself at Maxine Elliott’s Riviera villa and told her: ‘My dear Maxine, you have no idea how easy it is to travel without a servant. I came here all the way from London alone and it was quite simple.’ She murmured: ‘Winston, how brave of you.’

Reminiscing, he once said: ‘I was not twenty at the time of the Cuban War, and was only a Second Lieutenant, but I was taken to an inspection at West Point and treated as if I had been a General. I was brought up in that state of civilization when it was everywhere accepted that men are born unequal.’ This explains, in foreign affairs, the ferocity of his attacks on bolshevism well into the 1920s, long after his intransigence had become embarrassing to the government, and in domestic politics it accounts for his distrust of Labour. Late in life he read that Christopher Mayhew, one of Attlee’s junior ministers, had walked out during the arena scene in the film Quo Vadis. Winston ordered the picture screened at Chartwell and intently watched the scenes of mayhem in the arena. After it was over, he rose and told his family: ‘Do you know why Mr Mayhew walked out? It was because his socialist, egalitarian principles were outraged. There was one poor lion who hadn’t got a Christian.’

But if Churchill’s blind spots are often attributable to his aristocratic heritage, so are many of his successes. His career would have been impossible without preferential treatment. His name, not academic competence, got him through Harrow and Sandhurst. Then his mother, finally taking an interest in his affairs, began pulling strings for him. There were a great many available to her. She had been intimate with many influential men in America, on the Continent, in the British establishment; even in the royal family. Theoretically, her son was subject to army discipline in his youth. Actually, he moved around the world as he pleased. There is a stunning line in his book The River Wars: ‘With the design of thereafter writing this account, I moved to a point on the ridge which afforded a view of both armies.’ Here are two mighty forces preparing to do battle, and here is a lowly subaltern riding off to get the best perspective. A fellow war correspondent in South Africa pointed out that Churchill had the assurance, arrogance, and bravado that one found in the British ruling classes, ‘the conviction that he belongs to the best group in the world.’ He never doubted it. Nor did his mother. In 1900 other Englishwomen yearned to see their sons, off fighting the Boers. Jennie Churchill simply outfitted a hospital ship and sailed down to Cape Town to see how Winston was doing.

She didn’t pay for the vessel herself. She raised the funds by subscription. Her name wasn’t even among the subscribers’. She couldn’t afford it. She was always just a jump ahead of her creditors. So, for most of his life, was her son. To be sure, neither of them ever came close to a soup kitchen. Winston often complained of being broke, but that did not mean to him what it meant to most of his countrymen. He had expensive tastes, and he always indulged them. Consequently, he was often short of funds. In the desperate 1930s he was reduced to writing, for Collier’s and other popular magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, such pieces as The American Mind and Ours,’ ‘Is There Life on the Moon?’ and ‘Under the Microscope.’ (His most striking idea was an article to be titled ‘Will There Be a Woman Prime Minister?’ Editors vetoed it on the ground that it was too fantastic.) He would ask editors for payment, ‘if possible, by Monday morning.’ Six months before Munich, when he was waiting in the wings to stride out on the stage of history, he was so deep in red ink that he contemplated resigning from Parliament. He – and all he represented – was saved only when a wealthy friend settled his debts. On August 31, 1939, he wrote his publisher, ‘I am, as you know, concentrating every minute of my spare life and strength upon completing our contract. These distractions are trying.’ The distractions were German troop movements along the Reich’s eastern border. That night, as he stood at his high desk in Chartwell, correcting proofs, Hitler invaded Poland.

At Harrow he had first learned that he had a remarkable memory. Aged thirteen, he recited, without a slip, the twelve hundred lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Rome. And once he had committed something to memory, he rarely forgot it. In the autumn of his life he quoted verses he had read in Punch as a boy. Riding through the Maryland countryside, during World War II, he declaimed the whole of Whittier’s ‘Barbara Frietchie.’ In 1953, after he had suffered a stroke, he recited the thirty-four lines of Longfellow’s ‘King Robert of Sicily,’ which he had last read fifty years earlier, while his doctor followed the text. Moran found that ‘here and there he got a word wrong: priests became monks and lamps candles; perhaps half a dozen words out of three hundred and fifty.’ The writer met him that same year – my stateroom was next to his suite on the Queen Mary – and when he learned that I was a fledgling foreign correspondent on my way to Egypt and India, he reeled off amazingly detailed accounts of his own experiences as a correspondent there in the 1890s. At about the same time he asked Sir David Hunt: ‘Can you look up the exact words of this quotation from Aristophanes: “The qualities required for writing tragedy and comedy are the same, and a tragic genius must also be a comic genius”?’ Hunt told him he must mean Aristotle. Churchill indignantly denied it. ‘Light began to dawn,’ Hunt recalls. He checked the Loeb Classical Library in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 and found the line at the end of the Symposium, in Plato’s imaginary dialogue with Aristophanes. Awed, he asked the prime minister how recently he had read it. In Bangalore, Churchill said, in 1896. Hunt notes: ‘He was then twenty-two; at the time he recalled these words with perfect accuracy he was seventy-eight.’ Hunt was among those who suffered through the showing of Quo Vadis but thought it worth it when, later that evening, Churchill recited the entire fourteenth chapter of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That, too, had been among the books he had read at Bangalore.

He had also discovered at Harrow that he had a flair for the language. Although rated the stupidest boy in the school, he scribbled off essays for classmates who had difficulty writing. His later years as a newspaperman, and his early books, showed him that he could make a good living with his pen. His work was not universally admired; in English Prose Style, published in 1928, the eminent Oxford literary critic Sir Herbert Read declared that it revealed ‘aggrandisation of the self,’ that ‘such eloquence is false because it is artificial . . . the images are stale, the metaphors violent,’ and that a typical passage ‘exhales a false dramatic atmosphere . . . a volley of rhetorical imperatives.’ But Churchill wasn’t writing for critics. He was addressing the world, and to that end he had fashioned a soaring, resonant style, sparkling with eighteenth-century phrases, derivative of Gibbon, Johnson, Macaulay, and Thomas Peacock, throbbing with classical echoes of Demosthenes and Cicero, but uniquely his own. It is impossible to imagine him employing a ghost writer. No one but Churchill could write Churchillian prose. The stamp of the man is on everything he wrote or uttered, whether pondering the lessons of the past (‘the grievous inquest of history’), or describing Roosevelt’s polio (‘his lower limbs refused their office’), or those who feigned contempt for public affairs because they dared not commit themselves (‘flaccid sea anemones of virtue who can hardly wobble an antenna in the waters of negativity’). It made Sir Herbert wince, but its author won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Churchill’s feeling for the English tongue was sensual, almost erotic; when he coined a phrase he would suck it, rolling it around his palate to extract its full flavour. On first meeting Violet Asquith he told her that words had ‘a magic and a music’ all their own. That was what troubled Lloyd George, another critic of his rhetoric; he protested that to call Mussolini’s conduct in Ethiopia ‘at once obsolete and reprehensible,’ as Winston had, was meaningless. Unchastened, Churchill replied, ‘Ah, the b’s in those words: “obsolete, reprehensible.” You must pay attention to euphony.’ He said ‘I like short words and vulgar fractions.’ When short words hit hard he used them. Needing military equipment after Dunkirk, he told the United States, ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ He did not declare that the Allies had ‘consented to a coalition’ or ‘agreed to cooperate.’ Instead, they had ‘joined hands.’ But on other occasions he did not hesitate to dip into his enormous vocabulary. Once he dictated a note to the Admiralty: ‘Must we have his lugubrious ingemination of the news of our shipping losses?’ At first the sea lords thought his secretary had mistyped ‘insemination.’ Then they consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and found that ingemination means ‘redundancy.’

Like all writers, he had his favourite words: unflinching, austere, sombre, squalid. He said aircraft, not aeroplane, and airfield, never aerodrome. He also liked to gather his adjectives in squads of four. Bernard Montgomery was ‘austere, severe, accomplished, tireless’; Joe Chamberlain was ‘lively, sparkling, insurgent, compulsive.’ He would open a speech with a sluggish largo tempo, apparently unsure of himself; then he would pull out his organ’s Grand Swell and the Vox Humana, and the essence of his prose would be revealed; a bold, ponderous, rolling, pealing, easy rhythm, broken by vivid stabbing strokes. It gained force by its participatory character. He himself was part of the great events he described; he could say, with Aeneas, ‘Quorum pars magna fui.’ It is an advantage given to few, and those few have usually bungled it, resorting, among other things, to euphemisms, which Churchill scorned. He derided bureaucrats who called the poor the ‘lower income group,’ or lorries ‘commercial vehicles,’ or homes ‘accommodation units’ – once he astonished the House of Commons by bursting into song: ‘Accommodation unit, sweet accommodation unit, / There’s no place like accommodation unit.’ One of his first acts when he took over as prime minister in 1940 was to change the name of the ‘Local Defence Volunteers’ to the ‘Home Guard.’ Words like adumbrated and coordination do not appear in his work. Of an MP who strung together phrases of jargon, Churchill said: ‘He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.’ Of another, who had been defeated at the polls, he said, ‘Thank God we’ve seen the last of that Wuthering Height.’

He loved books and wrote of them: ‘If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.’ But he hated verbosity. ‘This paper, by its very length,’ he told a cabinet meeting, ‘defends itself against the risk of being read.’ And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously reworded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The prime minister scrawled across the page: ‘This is nonsense up with which I will not put.’ His profound knowledge of Latin and Greek was acquired through translations; he had been a miserable classics student. Labour MPs, most of whom lacked public-school educations, objected to classical phrases in the House for the very sensible reason that they couldn’t understand them. During a discussion of this Churchill rose to a point and began, ‘As to the chairman of this committee, he should be not facile princeps, but primus inter pares, which for the benefit of any . . .’ He paused while the Opposition MPs, anticipating insult, struggled to their feet. Then he broke up the House by continuing, ‘. . . for the benefit of any Old Etonians present, I should, if very severely pressed, venture to translate.’ His insularity, his feigned ignorance of all foreign tongues, was a source of popularity with the masses and served as antidote to his elitism. He told Jack Seely, later Lord Mottistone, ‘Jack, when you cross Europe you land at Marsai, spend a night at Lee-on and another in Paree and, crossing by Callay, eventually reach Londres. I land at Marsales, spend a night in Lie-ons, and another in Paris, cross by Calase, and come home to London.’ He believed that of all languages, English was incomparably superior. On his tongue, it was.

Throughout his youth, he once said, ‘it was my only ambition to be master of the spoken word.’ He glittered as a young MP, speaking after elaborate preparation but – like his father before him – without a note. Then one spring evening, in the middle of an address on a trade-union bill, he discovered that he couldn’t recall a word of his peroration. Speechless, he sank down on the bench and buried his head in his hands. Thereafter, when delivering a major speech, he came armed with everything he was going to say, including the pauses and the pretended fumbling for the right phrase in the first few sentences and anticipating ‘Cheers, “Hear, hears,”’ ‘Prolonged cheering,’ and even ‘Standing ovation.’ He said accurately, ‘I am not an orator. An orator is spontaneous.’ William Hazlitt wrote that the first duty of an orator is to echo back the feelings of his audience. Pitt translated a Latin epigram: ‘Eloquence is like a flame: it requires fuel to feed it, motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns.’ But Churchill was no echo; he needed neither fuel, motion, nor reflected glow. His speeches were one-way. Their lustre owed nothing to his listeners. F. E. Smith said: ‘Winston has spent the best years of his life writing impromptu speeches.’ Many of them were written in the bathtub. Norman McGowan, one of his valets, was surprised on his first day to hear his master’s voice rumbling from the bathroom. He put his head in and asked: ‘Do you want me?’ Churchill rumbled, ‘I wasn’t talking to you, Norman. I was addressing the House of Commons.’ Harold Nicolson congratulated him upon a remark to a small audience, apparently improvised as he left the podium. Churchill snapped, ‘Improvised be damned! I thought of it this morning in my bath and I wish now I hadn’t wasted it on this little crowd.’

He estimated that the preparation of a forty-minute speech took between six and eight hours. The actual writing of it wasn’t writing at all, at least not by him. He made his living, he said, from mouth to hand.’ He prowled back and forth in his study, head down, hands clasped behind his back, dictating to a secretary at a typewriter. That became the first of several drafts, the basis for his preliminary revisions. Scissoring and pasting came next. He despised the thump of staplers – the only sound he hated more was whistling – so in fastening pages he used a paper punch and threaded tape through the holes. He called the punch his ‘klop’ or ‘klopper.’ ‘Bring me my klop,’ he would tell a secretary. (There was a memorable day at Chartwell when a new girl left and returned staggering under the weight of Onno Klopp’s fourteen-volume Der Fall des Houses Stuart.) Eventually, when the address reached its penultimate form, he would add the asides and ‘RHGs’ (Right Honourable Gentlemen), underlining certain sentences, capitalizing others, and spacing the lettering to indicate words which were to be stressed or spoken slowly. In the last stage a special typewriter with large type was wheeled out. The speech was ready to be set down in what the staff called ‘psalm form’ because it looked as though it were being pointed for singing. This is what Churchill would see when he stood in the House, arranged his two pairs of spectacles, and glanced down at the final draft:

He was never a man for small talk, and during his early, awkward years, the cut and thrust of House debates found him wanting. Painfully aware of this weakness, he blamed it on his lack of a university education, during which such skills would have been developed and honed. His manner, haughty even then, invited merciless attack. Arthur Balfour taunted him: The Right Honourable Gentleman’s artillery is very powerful but not very mobile.’ Slowly Churchill realized that while he was a born writer, he would have to make himself a great parliamentarian. He did it by practising endlessly in front of mirrors, fashioning ripostes to this or that parry. He would never be comfortable listening to others speak, but over the years he came to relish Question Time in the House. And though his monologues were always more brilliant than his exchanges across the aisle, he developed a wit which has become an authentic part of his legend. It was not always good for him. As Harold Laski pointed out, people were so anxious to remember what he said that they didn’t drive him to defend his positions. Yet we can only be grateful to them for setting down his gibes. He shone and would have shone in any company – Falstaff in East cheap, say, or Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, or Johnson and Burke at the Mitre. Watching him build up to a quip was an entertainment in itself. Hugh Massingham recalls: ‘One always knew it was coming. His own laughter began somewhere in the region of his feet. Then a leg would twitch; the bubble of mirth was slowly rising through the body. The stomach would swell; a shoulder heave. By this time, the audience would also be convulsed, although it had no idea what the joke was going to be. Meanwhile, the bubble had ascended a little further and had reached the face; the lips were as mobile and expressive as a baby’s. The rich, stumbling voice would become even more hesitant. And finally there would be the explosion, the triumphant sentence of ridicule.’

Like all true wits, he knew the tickling quality of the unexpected. One day in the White House, according to Harry Hopkins, Churchill stepped naked from his bathroom just as Roosevelt was wheeling his chair into the room. This was always happening to him; the maids in his household at No. 10 had grown accustomed to his nudity. In this case FDR apologized and turned to go, but Churchill held up a detaining hand. He said solemnly: ‘The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.’ Before the battle of El Alamein, he summoned General Montgomery and suggested that he study logistics. Montgomery doubted that he should become involved in such technical matters. ‘After all, you know,’ he said, ‘they say that familiarity breeds contempt.’ Churchill replied: ‘I would like to remind you that without a degree of familiarity we could not breed anything.’ On his seventy-fifth birthday a photographer said: ‘I hope, sir, that I will shoot your picture on your hundredth birthday.’ Churchill answered: ‘I don’t see why not, young man. You look reasonably fit and healthy.’ On his eighty-fifth birthday a back-bencher in the House, assuming that Churchill was out of earshot, told the MP beside him: ‘They say the old man’s getting gaga.’ Without turning, Winston said: ‘Yes, and they say he’s getting deaf, too.’

More in character, his wit was usually aggressive. Sometimes he chose the rapier. Lady Astor neither gave nor asked for quarter, and she got none from him. At a dinner party she told him: ‘Winston, if I were your wife I’d poison your soup.’ He replied, ‘Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.’ But he was at his best baiting public men who crossed broadswords with him. It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles ‘the only bull who brings his own china shop with him,’ and who coined the progression, ‘dull, duller, Dulles.’ The austere Sir Stafford Cripps was a favourite target. In North Africa in World War II the prime minister said: ‘Here we are, marooned in all these miles of sand – not one blade of grass or drop of water or a flower. How Cripps would love it.’ After Cripps gave up smoking cigars, Churchill remarked that he was sorry to hear it: ‘The cigar was his last contact with humanity.’ As leader of the Opposition, Attlee could hardly escape, though the Labour leader, with his strong ego, enjoyed Churchill’s jabs at him. When Attlee was in Moscow, Churchill said of the Labour MPs he had left behind, ‘When the mouse is away, the cats will play.’ He called Attlee ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing,’ and ‘a modest man with much to be modest about,’ and he drove a sharp needle into Labour policy one day when he met him in the House’s men’s room. Attlee, arriving first, had stepped up to the urinal trough when Churchill strode in on the same mission, glanced at him, and stood at the trough as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, ‘Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?’ Churchill said: ‘That’s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.’

His niche in history – it is a big one – is secure. And so is his place in our affections. He will be remembered as freedom’s champion in its darkest hour, but he will be cherished as a man. He was a feast of character, a figure emanating parochial grandeur like King David, and he also belonged to that rare species, the cultivated man of action, the engage intellectual. Attlee said: ‘Energy and poetry . . . sum him up.’ But nothing sums him up. He was too many people. If ever there was a renaissance man, he was it. In the age of the specialist, he was the antithesis, our Leonardo. As a writer he was a reporter, novelist, essayist, critic, historian, and biographer. As a statesman he served, before becoming His Majesty’s first magistrate, as a minister for the colonies and for trade, home affairs, finance, and all three of the armed forces. Away from his desk he was at various times an aeroplane pilot, artist, farmer, fencer, hunter, breeder of racehorses, polo player, collector of tropical fish, and shooter of wild animals in Africa. One felt he could do anything. That was why he seemed inevitable in 1940. Bernard Shaw said: ‘The moment we got a good fright, and had to find a man who could and would do something, we were on our knees to Winston Churchill.’

It is pointless to expect balance and consistency in genius. Churchill was not made like other men. Among his many traits was a kind of built-in shock absorber which permitted him to survive his repeated defeats and concomitant depressions. Going through his papers one is struck by his resilience, his pounding energy, his volatility, his dogged determination, and his utter lack of humility. He said: ‘I am not usually accused, even by my friends, of being of a modest or retiring disposition.’ In the thousands of photographs of his face you will find every expression but one. He never looked apologetic. He had the temperament of a robber baron. As Walter Bagehot said of Palmerston, ‘His personality was a power.’ In World War I John Maynard Keynes singled out as his most striking virtue his intense concentration on the matter at hand – precisely the quality which, in the opinion of William James, identifies men of genius. In games he was a consistent winner. Like his distant cousin Douglas MacArthur, he was satisfied by nothing short of victory.

He was formidable, but he was also cherubic. That was what made him lovable even to those who recoiled from his benevolent despotism. He said, ‘All babies look like me.’ They did, and he looked like, and sometimes acted like, them. He enjoyed a child’s anthropomorphism – finishing a book, he would put it aside and say: ‘I don’t want to see his face again.’ His chief playthings were his seven-inch cigars, Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas. Most of the time they were unlit; he liked to chew and suck them anyway, and when an end grew soggy, he would fashion mouthpieces – ‘bellybandos,’ he called them – from paper and glue. Mornings he worked in bed wearing a scarlet and green-dragon silk bed jacket, with papers strewn around him, and his play in the bath was an important part of his daily ritual; on long flights his luggage included a portable canvas bathtub. Dictating, or just puttering around his study, he wore a bright quilted dressing gown, which had been originally designed for a character playing Pooh-Bah in a production of The Mikado, and gold-embroidered slippers bearing his initials, a gift from Lady Diana Cooper. In his Siren Suit, Lady Diana recalls, he looked ‘exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks.’

He was the absolute romantic. His paintings reflect this. There are no monotones – each stroke of his brash added shimmering light and colour. And everything he painted or wrote, his very gestures, was invested with emotionalism. ‘I’ve always been blubbery,’ he said. No man wept more easily. His tears flowed at the mention of gallantry in battle, the thought of invincible knights in olden days,’ victims of anti-Semitism, Canadian loyalty to the Empire, the death of George VI, Elizabeth II’s kindnesses towards him, or the name of Franklin Roosevelt – ‘the best friend Britain ever had.’ He never tried to hold back the teardrops because he never knew any inhibitions. In the middle of a 3:00 A.M. wartime conference at Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, his generals took a smoking break. One started playing ‘The Blue Danube’ on a piano, and to their amazement their host, all alone, started waltzing dreamily around the floor. His feelings about his family were laced with sentimentality. His home was an independent kingdom, with its own laws, its own customs, even its own language. ‘Wow!’ one of them would say in greeting another. When Churchill entered the front door he would cry: ‘Wow! Wow!’ and his wife would call back an answering ‘Wow!’ Then the children would rush into his arms and his eyes would mist over. Except when they lived at Chequers, their closest moments were at Chartwell. He tried never to miss a weekend there. It says much for his belief in privilege, and for his staff’s unquestioning acceptance of it, that No. 10 observed two distinct standards at Christmas, 1940. He was asked if the staff would have any time off. He said, ‘Yes, an hour for divine services.’ Then they all applauded as he flourished his V sign and left to spend a working holiday with his family.

The Churchill children were never spanked. The worst that could happen to them, according to Sarah, was banishment from his presence. Like many another great captain who has sent thousands of men to their deaths, he shrank from personal violence. This was most striking in his treatment of animals, even of insects. Since he detested fresh air – he had his bedroom windows sealed with putty – it was hard for bugs to get at him. But sometimes a bee, wasp, or moth flew in from another part of the house. ‘Don’t kill him,’ he would tell his valet. ‘Make sure you put him out of the window.’ Once, during a division in the House, Anthony Head, the first man out of the chamber, spied a ladybird on the carpet. Realizing that a thunder of MP feet would soon pass this way, he bent down to rescue it. At that moment the prime minister arrived and instantly grasped the situation. Taking charge, he said, ‘Put her out the window.’ But since the introduction of air conditioning the windows had been permanently locked. ‘Use the Chancellor’s office,’ he said, ‘and report back to me.’ Head did, but when he returned Churchill was in conference with the French foreign minister. The secretary told him he could look in for a moment. Head did and told Churchill: ‘She escaped. I let her out through Macmillan’s window. Nobody touched her.’ ‘Good, good!’ the prime minister boomed. To this day Head wonders what must have passed through the foreign minister’s mind.

‘Poor fox,’ Churchill said brokenly when an MFH presented him with a mounted fox head. En route to Chartwell one night, his car ran over a badger. He ordered the car stopped, picked up the shattered animal, and carried the dead, bleeding body home in the lap of his sniped pants. He would cry over the death of a swan or a cat; would leave the House chamber to telephone Chartwell, asking about the health of his goldfish. But his favourite pet was his little poodle Rufus. More accurately, there were two of them, Rufus I and Rufus II; the first was run down when a maid left him off his leash. (Churchill never spoke to her again.) Sometimes the Rufuses slept with him. After taking dictation – it might be 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. – his secretary would take the dog for his nightly walk. As Winston was about to drift off he would ask, ‘Did Rufus do his business?’ and, assured that he had, would sleepily congratulate him. The poodle ate in the dining room with the rest of the family. A cloth was laid for him on the Persian carpet beside the head of the household, and no one else ate until the butler had served Rufus’s meal. One evening at Chequers the film was Oliver Twist. Rufus, as usual, had the best seat in the house, on his master’s lap. At the point when Bill Sikes was about to drown his dog to put the police off his track, Churchill covered Rufus’s eyes with his hand. He said, ‘Don’t look now, dear. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.’

Predictably, Churchill’s taste in entertainment was unpredictable. In literature it was excellent, though of course he preferred British authors. Music was another matter; aged eleven, he had asked his parents for cello lessons, had been turned down, and had developed instead a fondness for what his daughter Mary calls ‘somewhat primitive’ tunes – such music hall favourites as ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow,’ ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,’ ‘Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,’ and a curious ballad about a husband who discovers that his bride has a wooden leg: ‘I Married Haifa Woman and Haifa Tree.’ He enjoyed any movie about the Royal Navy; otherwise, his preference in films was less discriminating than one might expect. When he learned that Rudolf Hess had parachuted into Scotland, for example, he was watching the Marx Brothers. His favourite star was Deanna Durbin. His favourite motion picture – he must have seen it twenty times – was Lady Hamilton with Laurence Olivier playing Lord Nelson and Vivien Leigh as his mistress. He was always lachrymose at the end of it. But probably the trashiest movie he ever watched was a sentimental pastiche based on a novel by Paul Gallico. Entitled Never Take No for an Answer, its chief character was a little Italian orphan whose donkey, named Violetta, helped him ran a grocery stand. Violetta sickened. She could be healed, the boy believed, if he could take her to that hub of miracles, the Shrine of Saint Francis. So the orphan embarked on a journey, appealing in vain to a series of clerics: priests, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, cardinals. Each time the boy was turned down the camera would flash back to Violetta, sprawled in her stable, ready for the last rites. Churchill wept inconsolably. ‘Oh, the donkey’s dead!’ he would sob. The others would reassure him: ‘No, no, Prime Minister, she’s still alive.’ Churchill would recover and declare firmly: ‘If the donkey dies, I shan’t stay. I shall go out.’ Finally the boy, in his finest hour, was granted an audience with the pope. The pontiff reversed the lower rulings and made an appointment at the shrine for Violetta. In the last scene a blazing cone of light, slanting down from heaven, revealed the donkey, bursting with health, beside her loyal, trudging little friend. The prime minister arose slowly from his chair, his eyes luminous and his cheeks streaming.

Joyously human, anachronistic and wise, capable of wilful misjudgement and blinding vision, dwarfing all those around him, he was the most benevolent of statesmen and the most gifted. Today the ordinary Englishman lives a better life than his fathers did, and for that he is largely indebted to Labour. But the extraordinary man has a harder time of it. He is trapped in regulations, his rise is impeded; his country pays a price. And even the masses seem to sense that while the socialists love ideas, Churchill, the unrepentant Victorian Tory, loved life. Since that love was balanced by a hatred of injustice, the average Briton owes him more than a higher standard of living. He owes him his very liberty.

‘History,’ wrote Aristotle, ‘is what Alcibiades did and suffered.’ Social scientists impeach that, but Churchill never doubted it. Because the man was matched by his times, he achieved immortality and changed the world, for good or for ill – though not as he had expected or would have wanted, for he was not the only giant in the century. In the long reach of events the impact of the Churchillian era upon his island was decidedly mixed. Hitler lost the war but he didn’t lose it to Britain alone. Churchill, in desperate need of allies, forged a coalition with the United States and the Soviet Union and then had to make concession after concession to them. They emerged in 1945 as superpowers; while Britain, formerly Great Britain, lost its Empire, lost its independent and decisive role in world affairs, and sank to the level of a second-rate power. Of course, that, too, was Aristotelian. Alcibiades routed the Spartans, but in the end he was dismissed and fled to Asia Minor, where he was murdered by Spartan agents. Tragedy is the wasting shadow always cast, sooner or later, by towering heroism. Therein lay the terrible grandeur in Churchill’s funeral, a quarter-century after Dunkirk. The nation was bidding farewell both to a great Englishman and to the greatness of England. When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bareheaded Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all that they had been, and were no longer, and would never be again.