I found the Great Courses lecture How Winston Churchill Saved the World by Michael Shelden to be informative giving more insight into the personal life of Churchill than the other two biographies I've encountered. Churchill had a lady friend who he relied on as and intellectual sounding board for his ideas. She would have gladly been his wife but Churchill married another. The friendship lasted.
Churchill was a man of intense curiosity. He was a cosmopolitan man of the world in contrast to Hitler and Stalin neither of whom ventured far from home. Churchill flew in planes to get a sense of the experience and also to obtain an overhead view of the British and European coastline. He advocated for aerospace research to develop airplanes capable of combating the German aircraft. The work on aircraft development was funded in part by a patriotic British heiress.
Churchill's experience in the Boar War as a combat soldier and a prisoner also informed his experience. He deplored the idiocy of the British generals ill advised charges out of the trenches into direct machine gun fire. Churchill's support of research on tank development, although ridiculed at the time, proved to be a useful resource in breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. As Lord of the Admiralty, his ill advised venture in the Dardanelles lead him to be pushed out of important public office. This was done with full endorsement of others but they disavowed the action once it failed.
This was similar to Harry Truman giving Churchill his backing for the Iron Curtain speech and then claiming he had no knowledge of it when there was a political uproar. One thing Churchill never lacked was the courage to stand up and eloquently defend his convictions.
His party's ouster from government after the war allowed him time to paint but resulted in disaster for the country. The post war socialist government under labor resulted in food and power shortages. Churchill referred to Socialism as "shared misery." The leaders were grossly in competent and lasted a few short years before Churchill's party returned to power and cleaned up the mess by keeping the things that worked and correcting the agriculture and energy sector.
At the end of the course leader Professor Shelden offered an alternate time line where Great Britain sues Nazi Germany for peace. That gives Hitler 10 years to develop advanced weaponry and tighten his control over a large area of the world. If Churchill and Great Britain had not stood up alone against Hitler, our world may have been very different.
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