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without abandoning conversation. His companions remarked on his lack of manual dexterity, evident when his pudgy fingers shuffled a pack of cards. “He has more wit than humour,”174 suggested Charles Wilson. Colville noticed that, while Churchill often smiled and chuckled, he never laughed outright, perhaps perceiving this as a vulgarity. The devotion he inspired in most of those who served him derived from a deportment which was at once magnificent and devoid of pomposity. In the early hours of a Sunday morning in his bedroom at Chequers, Colville recorded that Churchill “collapsed between the chair175 and the stool, ending in a most absurd position on the floor with his feet in the air. Having no false dignity, he treated it as a complete joke and repeated several times, ‘a real Charlie Chaplin!’” He displayed a lack of embarrassment about his own nakedness characteristic of English public schoolboys, soldiers and patricians accustomed to regard servants as mere extensions of the furniture.

He inspired more equivocal sentiments in his ministers and service chiefs. They were obliged to endure his monologues and sometimes rambling reminiscences, when it would have been more useful for him to heed their reports and—so they thought—their opinions. “Winston feasts on the sound176 of his adjectives,” wrote Charles Wilson, “he likes to use four or five words all with the same meaning as an old man shows you his orchids; not to show them off, but just because he loves them. The people in his stories do not come to life; they are interred in a great sepulchre of words … So it happens that his audience, tired by the long day, only wait for the chance to slip off to bed, leaving Winston still talking to those who have hesitated to get up and go.”

His changeability, sometimes on matters of the utmost gravity, exasperated those who themselves bore large responsibilities. Ian Jacob observed: “No one could predict177 what his mind would be on any problem.” It was galling for an exhausted general or administrator, denied the prime minister’s powers of choosing his hours, to hear that Churchill could not discuss vital matters in the afternoon, because a note bearing the sacrosanct word “Resting” was pinned to his bedroom door. Then the hapless officer or minister found himself summoned to do business at midnight or later.

The most damaging criticism of Churchill made by important people was that he was intolerant of evidence unless it conformed to his own instinct, and was sometimes wilfully irrational. Displays of supreme wisdom were interspersed with outbursts of childish petulance. Yet when the arguments were over, the shouting done, on important matters he usually deferred to reason. In much the same way, subordinates exasperated by his excesses in “normal” times—insofar as war admitted any—marvelled at the manner in which the prime minister rose to crisis. Bad news brought out the best in him. Disasters inspired responses which compelled recognition of his greatness. Few colleagues doubted his genius, and all admired his unswerving commitment to waging war. John Martin wrote of “the ferment of ideas178, the persistence in flogging proposals, the goading of commanders to attack—these were all expressions of that blazing, explosive energy without which the vast machine, civilian as well as military, could not have been moved forward so steadily or steered through so many setbacks and difficulties.” Churchill conducted the affairs of his nation with a self-belief that was sometimes misplaced, but which offered an elixir of hope to those chronically troubled by rational fears. Amid Britain’s sea of troubles, he represented a beacon of warmth and humanity, as well as of will and supreme courage, for which even the most exalted and sceptical of his fellow countrymen acknowledged gratitude.

A widespread illusion persists, that in 1940 Churchill broadcast constantly. In reality, he delivered only seven speeches over the BBC between May and December, roughly one a month. But the impact of these was enormous, upon a nation which in those