The Prime Minister's Burden: Winston Churchill and the Hard Road from Dunkirk to Defeat at the Polls (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798274820509)

He saved his country from defeat - and then his country voted him out.

Winston Churchill is immortalised as the bulldog of 1940: the man of Dunkirk, the Blitz and "we shall never surrender." But behind the speeches and the myth was a prime minister carrying a far heavier load than most people ever see.

The Prime Minister's Burden: Winston Churchill and the Hard Road from Dunkirk to Defeat at the Polls follows Churchill from the moment he entered Downing Street in May 1940 through the crises that defined his premiership - and the shock of being thrown out by the voters in 1945.

Inside, you'll see him:

• Fighting the Battle of Britain and enduring the Blitz while U-boats try to starve Britain into surrender.

• Gambling in North Africa from Tobruk to El Alamein, and battling the Americans over when and where to invade Europe.

• Walking a tightrope between Roosevelt and Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, knowing Soviet tanks will decide the fate of half of Europe.

• Standing on the balcony for VE Day - then losing a landslide election to Clement Attlee weeks later.

This isn't hagiography and it isn't a hit job. It's a clear, narrative look at a leader who got the biggest questions mostly right, many others badly wrong, and discovered that even victory doesn't guarantee gratitude.

The Prime Ministers' Burden series tells the story of Britain's leaders not as marble statues, but as fallible humans under extreme pressure. This first volume captures Churchill at his highest and lowest - from "blood, toil, tears and sweat" to the quiet moment when the country decided the future belonged to someone else.