Sir Winston Spencer Churchill (Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill) Biography

British statesman and historian, born in Blenheim Palace, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. While on military service in Cuba, India, and Africa from 1895 to 1899, he acted as war correspondent for various periodicals. Among his early publications are the campaign histories The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899). His only novel, Savrola, a politically acute tale of revolution, appeared in 1900, the year he entered parliament as MP for Oldham. In 1955 he retired from an illustrious and often controversial political career after a second term as Prime Minister. His inspiring leadership, which drew on his remarkable powers of oratory, throughout the Second World War established him in the general regard as the greatest statesman of his age; War Speeches 1940–1945 was published in 1946. The magisterial The Second World War (6 volumes, 1948–54) is the most valued of his histories, which also include The World Crisis (4 volumes, 1923–9), a study of the First World War, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 volumes, 1956–8), a survey of Britain and its influence from pre-history to the modern era. In 1953 he was awarded a Nobel Prize. Among Churchill's other works are the autobiographical My Early Life (1930), the biography of his celebrated forebear Marlborough (4 volumes, 1933–8), and Great Contemporaries (1937), which contains perceptive portraits of T. E. Lawrence and others Churchill admired. Thirty-four volumes of his Collected Works appeared between 1973 and 1976. His son Randolph Churchill (1911–68) wrote the first two volumes (1966, 1967) of an official biography; a further six volumes (1971–88) were produced by Martin Gilbert.