“The irresistible force meets the immovable object,” grunted Churchill. This is known, in philosophy, as the “sword and shield paradox,” a conundrum in which two absolute forms of power are pitted against each other. But it also captured something of Churchill’s wartime philosophy: immovability would bring victory (“We shall never surrender”), but it must be combined with overwhelming and dramatic force. War was not just a matter of bombs and bullets, but of capturing imaginations. Stirling
