When Winston Churchill was asked by George VI to take the reins of power in May 1940 he later recalled that 'I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.' Our relationship with the Greatest Briton is similarly framed by this same sense of an inevitable fate. It is difficult, from our perspective, to disentangle the man from the legend that has accumulated around him...