Winston Churchill followed his own star. He yearned to be ‘great’, to gain historical immortality.
And he did so through deeds and words: his actions as a soldier and politician, gilded by his writings as a journalist and historian.
But Churchill’s path to greatness was also defined by the leaders he encountered along the way – friends and foes, at home and abroad. Men of power such as Hitler and Mussolini, Roosevelt and Stalin, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain and Charles de Gaulle. And the haunting presence of the adored father who had seen nothing of merit in his troublesome son. In these men Churchill discerned greatness, or its absence, in ways that influenced his own career.