Dominic Sandbrook

Yeah, yeah.

Now, most politicians' memoirs, you sense the sort of pomposity or the vanity or whatever.

With Churchill, of course, there's a bit of vanity, but there's a tremendous sort of an irony, a sense of irony about himself and his own persona that makes him infectious.

So in terms of the characters of British history,

I think he's clearly up there as one of the most richly enjoyable, but also precisely because he stands for what's become a really defining modern myth, which is standing alone against the Nazis, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and so on.

I think that puts him in a different league, and I think the only people that really compete with him are your Nelsons, Elizabeth I, Alfred the Great, maybe there are one or two others.

But in terms of elected politicians, I think he probably stands alone.

It's a good question.

I think, so he has a sort of a sense that a lot of great politicians have of being a performer on a stage, everybody looking at him and wanting to measure up, kind of diva quality.

What does he say famously?

We're all worms, but I believe that I'm a glow worm.

And he sort of always tried to live up to that.

For me, actually, one of the remarkable things about Churchill is that if you look at his boyhood, his background,

So he's the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jenny Jerome, who are terrible parents.

Lord Randolph is literally driven mad, possibly by sexually transmitted disease.

Jenny Jerome is a monstrous person, an American heiress who marries Lord Randolph.

They basically pack Winston off to prep school and then to Harrow.

There are stories he's not allowed to come home at Christmas, for example, because it will interfere with his mother's affair with an Austrian diplomat.

We have letters from him to his mother and father begging them to come and visit him in Harrow, and they don't come.

They, in fact, write it back to him and say, stop snivelling, you brat, you're so wet, you're such a failure, leave us alone.