Winston Churchill fully intended to be Prime Minister by the age of forty: elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he seemed to many an unprincipled over-achiever who would never play the game. His years in office appear as a succession of crises: strikes, the Irish problem, the rebellion of the Sea Lords, and the outbreak of the First World War which found him at the head of the world's mightiest navy. In 1915, at the end of the forty years so outstandingly chronicled in Churchill - The Rise to Failure, Winston saw his career in tatters. Ousted from the Admiralty, where he had been held responsible for the Dardanelles fiasco, he was on his way to France, where he could at least fight in the trenches...