Winston Churchill
A cavalry officer and war correspondent, taken prisoner by the Boers and escaped; a minister in two parties in turn, answerable for the failure of the Dardanelles in 1915 and thrown out over it. Through the thirties he warned about Hitler almost alone, and in May 1940 took charge of a country left facing the Reich by itself: he held it through the Battle of Britain, made an ally of Roosevelt and a partner of Stalin. He lost the election of 1945 two months after the victory, returned in 1951, wrote history — the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 — and painted in oils. He died in 1965 at ninety.
He was born at Blenheim Palace near Woodstock on 30 November 1874 at 01:30 Greenwich time, two months early. The hour is in the letter his father sent that same day.