Dominic Sandbrook

And that means that in the 1890s, for example,

when he's a young man and he wants to cut his teeth, he is given these wonderfully exotic backgrounds against which to do it.

The Northwest Frontier.

He goes to watch the Americans fighting in Cuba.

He famously goes to South Africa as a war correspondent.

You know, this amazing story of going to South Africa.

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...