He then recounted the battle to his entourage, one in which he himself had taken part in the charge of the 21st Lancers, the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire. There, 45 years after the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, he laid out the matches to mark the relative dispositions of the Khalifa’s Dervish army and Lord Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian force at that engagement. In September 1943, returning to Britain from the Quebec Conference aboard the battleship HMS Renown, Winston Churchill called for a box of matches to be brought to the admiral’s cabin after dinner.

We think of Churchill as a hero who saved civilization from the evils of Nazism and warned of the grave crimes of Soviet communism, but Roberts's masterwork reveals that he has as much to teach us about the challenges leaders face today-and the fundamental values of courage, tenacity, leadership and moral conviction.The Battle of Omdurman, 1898. This treasure trove of access allows Roberts to understand the man in revelatory new ways, and to identify the hidden forces fueling Churchill's legendary drive. The Royal Family permitted Roberts-in a first for a Churchill biographer-to read the detailed notes taken by King George VI in his diary after his weekly meetings with Churchill during World War II. Roberts gained exclusive access to extensive new material: transcripts of War Cabinet meetings, diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs from Churchill's contemporaries. But how did young Winston become Churchill? What gave him the strength to take on the superior force of Nazi Germany when bombs rained on London and so many others had caved? In Churchill, Andrew Roberts gives readers the full and definitive Winston Churchill, from birth to lasting legacy, as personally revealing as it is compulsively readable. When we seek an example of great leaders with unalloyed courage, the person who comes to mind is Winston Churchill: the iconic, visionary war leader immune from the consensus of the day, who stood firmly for his beliefs when everyone doubted him. In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood-by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Last King of America. A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” - Wall Street Journal

“Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill. One of The New York Times ’s Notable Books of 2018 One of The Economist’s Best Books of 2018 One of The Wall Street Journal ’s Ten Best Books of 2018

Winston churchill andrew roberts