Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born in 1874, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife. As a junior officer he fought in four campaigns; as a war correspondent in South Africa he made an epic escape from Boer captivity; in politics he held numerous ministerial posts and, from the backbenches in the 1930s, increasingly warned of the dangers of German rearmament, of appeasement, and of Britain's unreadiness for war. In May 1940 he succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister. His inspiring leadership of the British people, and the war-winning relationships he established with America and the Soviet Union, won him worldwide fame, and he became an overwhelming presence on the international stage. He died in 1965 and, after a magnificent state funeral, was buried in the graveyard of the tiny parish church close to Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the house in which he had been born.

Dominique Enright is a freelance writer and editor. Her other books include The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, The Wicked Wit of William Shakespeare (both 2002) and The Wicked Wit of Women (2003), as well as collections of the poetry of Wordsworth, Burns, Keats and Kipling (all 2002). Her most recently published work is Winston Churchill: The Greatest Briton (2003).