Some 70 years ago, on the evening of May 10, 1940, a controversial British politician entered Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The king asked him to become prime minister and to form a government. The politician then left to carry out his new job. His name was Winston Churchill.
To this day, that change in leadership — with the appeaser Neville Chamberlain shuttling off the stage — has been regarded as decisive. The dishonest decade of the 1930s had gone; now came “blood, sweat, toil and tears” — and an eventual, hard-fought victory. If anything proved Thomas Carlyle’s argument about the importance of the Great Man in history, then here it was. There was also ample contemporary evidence for this leader-centered theory in the form of Hitler (who adored Carlyle and was still reading him in his bunker in April 1945), Stalin and Roosevelt.
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