1941 first edition hardcover with dust jacket and 347 pages in secondhand condition. Name in ink in front.

Churchill was perhaps the greatest British leader of the last hundred years.

But how did the man become the Prime Minister who led his country through WWII.

Mr Churchill is a brilliant portrait of a brilliant man, telling the life-story of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, O.M., C.H., from his early years up to his becoming Prime Minister in 1940.

The red-headed, obstreperous youngster (whose parents were the Victorian statesman Lord Randolph Churchill and a talented American beauty) did not shine as a Harrow schoolboy, and twice failed to pass into Sandhurst.

He saw active service in Cuba; as a cavalry subaltern, he distinguished himself on the North-west Frontier of India and galloped in a wild charge against fanatical Dervishes in the Sudan; then, as war correspondent in South Africa, he made a thrilling escape from his Boer captors.

Entering Parliament, he rapidly came to the fore, changed his party allegiance, was a Cabinet Minister at 33, and before he was 50 had occupied nearly every high Ministerial post.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, he ensured that the Fleet was ready at the outbreak of war in 1914; but the Dardanelles failure and the formation of a Coalition Government resulted in his fall from high office, and he joined the Army in France.

He returned to the Government later and was in turn Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Air and the Colonies, and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For ten years from 1929 he was in the political wilderness, and in the 1930s vainly warned the country of the Nazi menace.

At last, in 1939, he again took over the Admiralty; and then, dramatically, in the gravest crisis Britain had ever faced, he was at last called to assume the nations leadership.

It is an inspiring story; and this book directs attention not only to his greatness as a strategist and administrator, but also to his eminence as a historian and writer.