Churchill fought the war twice over - as Prime Minister and again as its premier historian.

In 1948-54 he published six volumes of memoirs which secured his reputation and shaped our understanding of the conflict to this day.

Using the drafts and correspondence for The Second World War, David Reynolds opens our eyes to Churchill the author and to the research ''syndicate'' on whom he depended. We see how the memoirs were censored by Whitehall to conceal secrets such as the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and how Churchill himself censored them to avoid offending current world leaders.

This book forces us to reconsider much received wisdom about the war and illuminates an unjustly neglected period of his life - the Second Wilderness Years of 1945-51, when Churchill, now over seventy, wrote himself into history, politicked himself back into Downing Street and delivered some of the most important speeches of his career.