Winston Churchill

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in 1874, the elder son of the Conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill and the American heiress Jennie Jerome. An indifferent pupil at Harrow, he entered the army through Sandhurst and, as a young cavalry officer in the 1890s, made himself a war correspondent as well. His dispatches and books from the North-West Frontier, the Sudan — where he rode in the cavalry charge at Omdurman — and South Africa, where his escape from a Boer prison made him famous, established a pattern of acting in history and writing it at once.

He entered Parliament in 1900 and, through decades of office, defeat and return, never stopped writing. Writing was both vocation and livelihood: a biography of his father; The World Crisis, his account of the First World War; the memoir My Early Life; and the four-volume Marlborough, a life of his great ancestor composed during the years when he was out of office and warning against Nazi Germany. His prose is rhetorical, periodic and confident, shaped by Gibbon and Macaulay, and his speeches as prime minister from 1940 rallied Britain through its most perilous years.

After the war he wrote The Second World War in six volumes, a history that was also a defence of his own conduct, and went on to complete A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The Nobel Prize came in 1953, during his second term as prime minister; his wife, Clementine, accepted it on his behalf in Stockholm. He retired from the premiership in 1955 and died in London in 1965, receiving a state funeral. His record, particularly on empire, remains vigorously debated.