The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

by Boris Johnson

Soames broods, and then surprises me by saying that his grandfather was an ordinary sort of chap. He did what other Englishmen like doing: mucking about at home, hobbies and so forth. ‘You know, in many ways he was quite a normal sort of family man,’ he says.

For several decades now it has been fashionable to say that these so-called great men and women are just epiphenomena, meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history.

Well, I think the story of Winston Churchill is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference.