Quotes from Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The story of the past generation has been that the right has won politically and the left has won culturally.

But the Declaration was bitterly opposed by another Liberal. Edwin Montagu was the only Jewish member of the Cabinet and, like many assimilated Jews at the time, was appalled by the very idea of Zionism and a Jewish state, which seemed to brand him an alien in his own country.

Not long before her death, Mary Soames, Churchill's last surviving child, said about her father, 'The thing to remember is that he was a journalist.' So he was, and in his double career as politician and journalist, the writing enriched him, with earnings far larger than even the prime minister's salary, while also tempting him to play his habitual role as a lone wolf, free of party loyalty.

Posterity may judge Churchill less harshly. If he thought that Russian Communism represented an awful regression into barbarism, he was quite right. Generations of starry-eyed enthusiasts in the West would be enchanted by the Soviet myth, and then disenchanted because they had learned what 'we never knew', when in fact everything could be known from the start. There was, after all, no mystery.

Even so, Churchill's path was well-nigh unique in deserting one party for another and then deserting back again.

And as Alexander Pope observed at the time, Blenheim has always felt more monument than home: Thanks, Sir, cry'd I, 'tis very fine. But where d'ye sleep, or where d'ye dine? I find by all you have been telling, That 'tis a house, but not a dwelling.

If Sunny had died without begetting an heir, Churchill would have become Duke of Marlborough, and would never have sat in the House of Commons, let alone become prime minister. As it was, he entered the Commons, where he would sit for more than sixty years.

The Boers 'must be helped to rebuild their farms; the gold mines must do that. What more fitting function for the wealth of South African soil (better build farms in South Africa than palaces in Park Lane!†).' This change, from the happy warrior to the young MP who could now say, 'I hate and abominate all this expenditure on military armaments,' was one of his first transformations.

Churchill was obsessively devoted to his father, and ever after passionately concerned to justify himself to the shade of the man whose death had ended 'all my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side, and in his support. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.' There is the crucial word: vindicate.

on 31 May 1904 Churchill 'crossed the floor': he entered the Chamber, walked towards the Speaker's Chair, bowed, and then turned right instead of left to sit on the Opposition benches, from which he would savagely attack the party he had just deserted. For the Tories he was now 'the Blenheim rat', and it did look as though he was leaving a sinking ship.

It was a Liberal landslide, and a new dawn, with a government of new men for a new age. Churchill's reward for changing parties came straight away, when he was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Colonies.

When the last Allied soldiers were evacuated from Gallipoli in early 1916, more than 34,000 British dead were left behind, as well as nearly 10,000 from Australia and almost 3000 from New Zealand, nearly 10,000 French and French colonial troops who are often forgotten, and some 1400 Indians who always are. They weren't the only casualties of the most controversial campaign of the Great War. Left behind also were Churchill's reputation and career. How had it come to this?

No less enthusiastically, Churchill saw that air power 'may ultimately lead to a form of control over semi-civilised countries which will be found very effective and infinitely cheaper', adding that, 'I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes

Unusually among European languages, English has distinct words for 'story' and 'history' rather than the same word for both: 'Was für eine Geschichte!' means 'What a story!' rather than 'an excellent history book', and une histoire can be tittle-tattle in the street as well as a work of historical scholarship. For Winston Churchill, there was never any distinction.

He soon made himself deeply disliked by many naval officers by his energetic reforming and general meddling, although this was largely to his credit. He wanted to improve the conditions of ordinary seamen, and to increase their pay for the first time since the early days of Victoria's reign, and at the other end he created a naval staff. 'I knew thoroughly the current

To understand a man, Napoleon said, you need to know how the world looked when he was twenty.

Churchill himself would later, if privately, say that returning to gold was the worst mistake of his life, a high standard indeed.

Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.' Penetrating words, and he had no idea just how horribly true they would prove over the next fifty years.

And while he protested that he was more than just a soldier, Churchill recognised in himself an obsession with war, along with a contradictory fear of that obsession. 'Much as war attracts me,' he had written to Clementine from the German army manoeuvres in 1909, '& fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year … what vile & wicked folly and barbarism it is

Churchill had always had a strong sense of personal destiny: 'Why have I always been kept safe within a hair's breadth of death, except to do something like this?' Now he felt that more than ever that, even if war was folly and barbarism, it was his fulfilment – and opportunity.

Churchill that he had a great many military ideas, most of them likewise bad.

his removal was universally welcomed in the navy, not least by that old salt, George V. The formation of the new government was most desirable, since 'Only by that means can we get rid of Churchill from Admiralty,' the king told the queen. 'He is the real danger' and 'has become impossible'.

he had died as late as the New Year of 1939, he would, as Paul Addison says, 'perhaps be remembered today as the most illustrious and interesting failure in twentieth-century British politics'. Certainly until his apotheosis he was more often seen as an 'interesting failure' than as the subject for a study in greatness.

He was a great something, but a great what?