The British statesman who led Britain through the Second World War, forged the Allied coalition that defeated Nazi Germany, and then lost the 1945 election to the Labour Party that built the welfare state he opposed — a figure whose wartime achievement was real and whose colonial record was brutal, and who named the Cold War's defining geography with a single phrase.
Churchill was voted out of office two months after VE Day, while the war with Japan was still being fought. The British public that had just endured the Blitz under his leadership chose Clement Attlee instead. This is worth sitting with: the man who saved liberal democracy in Europe was rejected by the democracy he saved, in favor of building the social institutions he had spent his career opposing. The gap between the Churchill of wartime legend and the Churchill of domestic politics is where understanding him begins.