As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm, Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds of his ruinously expensive mansion in Kent, brooding like Orwell on the ugliness of dictatorship.

For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party as a posturing has-been, embarrassingly devoted to lost causes like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.

So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing.

And as he wrote -- thousands of pages on his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, thousands more on "The History of the English Speaking Peoples", keeping company with the vanished generations who faced invasion before -- so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.

First, the Little Englanders, stuck in their dream world of hunts and gymkhanas, had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not, Britain would share Europe's fate.

There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe, leave it with its hatreds and its armaments, to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels." Now there would be much to be said for this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations and could tow them 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.

Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers, men like Neville Chamberlain, who seriously imagined that Hitler and the Nazis were reasonable men with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated after the last war, and who would stop at reasonable demands.

The appeasers, Churchill thought, were like men who imagined you could satisfy a ravenous wolf by throwing it a sheep or two, in the hope that when it got to you, it would be full.

In 1938, Hitler, who had already annexed Austria, threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.