He was born by candlelight in a palace and buried by the light of television cameras that carried his funeral to the world. In between, Winston Churchill lived nine decades that ran from the last cavalry charges of the British Empire to the hydrogen bomb — and for one terrible year, in 1940, the survival of European liberty seemed to rest on the stubbornness of a single sixty-five-year-old man who would not make peace with Hitler.

E.B Cohen tells the whole story: the love-starved boy of Blenheim and the brilliant, ruined father he spent his life trying to avenge; the reckless young soldier-correspondent who charged at Omdurman and escaped a Boer prison camp to become a national hero at twenty-five; the radical minister who built the first scaffolding of the welfare state; the First Lord who readied the fleet and then authored the catastrophe of the Dardanelles; the wilderness prophet who warned of Hitler to a Parliament that called him a warmonger; the voice that held Britain to the fight through Dunkirk and the Blitz; the Cold War statesman who named the Iron Curtain; and the Nobel-winning writer who lived long enough to shape his own legend.

Even-handed and unflinching, this is a portrait of the greatness and the flaws alike — the indispensable leader of the finest hour and the unrepentant Victorian imperialist; the humane reformer and the die-hard enemy of Indian freedom; the magnanimous statesman and the man of towering ego, black moods, and enormous appetite. It is the complete single-volume life of the most consequential Briton of the twentieth century — the man who, when everything counted, simply would not surrender.

Never Surrender

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