Churchill was born at the end of the Victorian era and lived until the 1960s. The changes in politics and wars were dizzying and many of his contemporaries stuck to the "old rules" they had learned being children. Churchill was a rebellious child, a challenge to the masters of the very aristocratic schools he attended. Churchill's curriculum is one of those things that tends to make you feel bad about yourself. He was a soldier, journalist, writer and politician. He fought the dervishes, fled a Boer prison camp, and held almost every cabinet post in the British government.

He made mistakes that would have destroyed the careers of inferior men, but he nevertheless became Hitler's main enemy. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, amassed and wasted great fortunes, and did it all consuming great amounts of alcohol and cigars but was rarely drunk. Churchill had an energy and a dynamic that, when he succumbs to the withering of old age, it is like looking at a faint light in the dark.