In 1956 – half a century ago this year – Sir Winston Churchill published the first volume of his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature three years earlier, and this new four-volume work rightly won massive critical acclaim. A J P Taylor considered that "it is one of the wisest, most exciting works of history ever written".It was during his Wilderness Years of the 1930s that Churchill had conceived the idea of a book that would, in his words, "lay stress upon the common heritage of the peoples of Great Britain and...