Dominic Sandbrook

The train is attacked by the Boers.

this shootout on the train where he takes command.

He's taken prisoner and then escapes from prison as the most wanted man in the Boer War.

escapes by hiding down a mine that just happens to be run by somebody who's sympathetic to the British cause, then getting onto another train that takes him to salvation in Mozambique.

So if any of you have seen the Young Churchill film, you'll remember the scene when he escapes and then the train crosses the border and he's kind of shouting in the air for joy.

I mean, this is all true.

He mythologized it, of course, and turned it into great newspaper copy and then books and then the genesis of his political career.

But it happened and it wouldn't have happened had he not had the extraordinary good fortune to be born at a point where Britain's world power gave him that possibility.

And then I think the cause of the empire and of what he saw as Britain's great

destiny, its adventure, its glory.

That's what he stood for more than anything else.

So when he changes parties, conservative to liberal, and then constitutionalist and then back to conservative again, national government and so on, Churchill is very hard to pin down politically.

But the one thing that runs through his life and career like a thread is that commitment to the empire.

And empire, I think, not in terms of...

I think a lot of people get this wrong when they talk about church and empire.

I don't think he thinks of it in terms of oppression and subjugation.

He thinks of it in terms of sort of technicolor adventures, excitement, exoticism, and glory.

And of course he sees the colonial peoples

Often he doesn't give them agency and he sees them merely as supporting characters in a drama in which he and people like him, other public schoolboys, will always have the leading roles.

But I don't think it's an inhuman way of thinking about the world.