By John Steele Gordon

Had Winston Churchill never set foot in the House of Commons, he would still be remembered today as one of the major writers of his time.

Winston Churchill is one of the titanic figures in the history of the 20th century. If not for him, that century would have turned out very differently indeed. It is hard to see how Britain could have long survived the fall of France without Churchill’s adamant refusal to consider negotiations, his shrewd diplomacy to nudge a reluctant United States into aiding Britain’s cause, and his immortal oratory to strengthen British resolve in the face of the German onslaught.
Had Britain been knocked out of the war in the summer of 1940, could anything have stopped Hitler’s conquest of the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and then the Soviet Union? Could even the United States have then prevented, in Churchill’s words, “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”?