In this powerful biography, the middle volume of William Manchester’s critically acclaimed trilogy, Winston Churchill wages his defining campaign: not against Hitler’s war machine but against his own reluctant countrymen. Manchester contends that even more than his leadership in combat, Churchill’s finest hour was the uphill battle against appeasement.

As Parliament received with jeers and scorn his warnings against the growing Nazi threat, Churchill stood alone—only to be vindicated by history as a beacon of hope amid the gathering storm.

Manchester has such control over a huge and moving narrative, such illumination of character, that he can claim the considerable achievement of having assembled enough powerful evidence to support Isaiah Berlin’s judgment of Churchill as ‘the largest human being of our time.’