FOR twenty years after the Second World War Winston Churchill’s status as ‘the greatest living Englishman’ was seldom questioned. Biographers celebrated his life, contemporaries paid tribute in their memoirs, and potters designed Churchill toby jugs adorned with quotations from his speeches. As a general rule, historians had little to say about him. They regarded events since 1914 as too recent for historical enquiry: hence the leading authority on Churchill’s life and times was the great man himself. His six volume historyThe Second World War, was generally accepted as a definitive interpretation.