Winston Churchill

I was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, son of Lord Randolph and Jennie Jerome. In the Sudan I rode with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman; in South Africa I reported the Boer War, was captured, and escaped Pretoria to Portuguese East Africa. That jailbreak, more luck than planning, put my name in the papers and my feet in Parliament.

I entered the Commons in 1900 and, in 1904, I 'ratted' to the Liberals. At the Board of Trade and the Home Office I pushed labour exchanges and prison reform. As First Lord of the Admiralty I readied the fleet, turned it from coal to oil, backed naval air—and, disastrously, the Dardanelles. I resigned, took a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers to the Western Front, and learned mud, wire, and responsibility the hard way.

Back with the Conservatives by 1924, I balanced the books as Chancellor and unwisely chained the pound to gold. In the 1930s I howled in the wilderness while Germany rearmed. In May 1940 I was called to form a government; I would not traffic with Hitler. The RAF held the line; in bomb-battered nights I walked the ruins, conferred in the War Rooms, and forged with Roosevelt—and later Stalin—the alliance that broke the Axis.

Victory brought defeat: in 1945 the voters dismissed me. I warned at Fulton of an Iron Curtain, returned to office in 1951, and tried to spare Britain new wars while managing frail health. I painted to steady the mind, wrote my histories, and was awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. I kept a cigar not for display but for steadiness, and a faith that words, rightly chosen, can stiffen spines.