winston s churchill we shall fight on the beaches

Just before his eighth birthday, he was sent to board at St George’s School in Ascot, where his conduct over the years was described as “extremely bad” and “very naughty”. Surviving school was Churchill’s first major challenge. These letters are not the artifice of today’s media manipulators but the unvarnished thoughts of a man in the most private moments of his extraordinary life. Through them we get glimpses of the real Winston – of the stubborn, wilful, rebellious schoolchild, the headstrong and ambitious soldier, the campaigning politician, the loving husband and father, and the resolute war leader. He did that as much with words as with actions, and his mastery of language is apparent in his own letters. He could be egotistical, was eternally impatient, his opinions were loud and his faults manifest, but somewhere along the way he managed to save our world. I have both known and created characters who were villains or heroes and sometimes both, but none has captured me as much as Churchill.

I have spent most of those years since then either working in politics or re-imaging politics for the novel, stage or screen. Muffled drums beat out their sorrows, the cranes of London’s docks lowered their heads in respect, and a fire was lit under my imagination that has lasted a lifetime.

I first stumbled across Winston Churchill as a teenager when I watched his funeral on a black-and-white television screen sitting beside my mother, whose cheeks were soaked with tears.

Winston s churchill we shall fight on the beaches