Paging Winston Churchill.

Then again, he was an inviting target. A man of enormous ego (like the mayor of a certain big city), Churchill felt called by destiny, convinced Providence would steer him to greatness. (Jibed one friend after the publication of his history of World War I: "Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it 'The World Crisis.'") A political opportunist, he switched parties, not once, but twice (Conservative, then Liberal, then back to Conservative). He consorted with shady characters, raffish hacks and the vulgar rich. Were one to overhear a conversation between two Tory MPs about him in the late '20s (after he had gone back to the Conservatives), epithets like "shameless cadger" and "incorrigible scrounger" would pepper the air. Even when he walked onto the floor of Parliament for the first time as prime minister, members of his own party sat on their hands, saving their praise for the man he deposed -- Neville Chamberlain, Hitler's dupe.

Without the Second World War, Churchill would be remembered very differently today. Until he became prime minister in 1940, there was a whiff of failure about him; he was merely near-great. Though he had held almost every portfolio outside Britain's highest office -- 1st lord of the admiralty (secretary of the navy), home secretary, chancellor of exchequer -- he had a long list of screw-ups on his résumé. Perhaps the most notorious of these were the Gallipoli landings, which he planned. The operation was a fiasco, and to this day is still remembered as one of the great failures of World War I.

By the 1930s, books like "The Tragedy of Winston Churchill" were appearing in shops. During those fraught decades -- his "wilderness years" -- he was out of office, working as a journalist and, at least among the ranks of Tory politicians, a lone voice warning against the Nazi menace, "an alarm clock, but [a] rasping one, which made most more anxious to turn it off than to respond to its summons," as Roy Jenkins aptly writes in his new biography, "Churchill." In our own time, "appeasement" is a dirty word; but in the '30s, the appeasers were widely considered honorable men who wanted to avoid another war with Germany. To a great many, Churchill was merely an irresponsible warmonger, a dangerous adventurer hell-bent on drawing Britain into battle to advance his career.

Yet what of Churchill's "finest hour," his leadership in the Second World War? A great many hoary clichis have grown up about his war years. For A.J.P Taylor -- a notoriously contrarian historian of leftist tendencies -- Churchill was nothing less than the "savior of his country." But in recent years there has been much debate about this, his one seemingly unassailable achievement.

Historians have lined up to take their best shots at knocking the man off his pedestal. In 1993, a flurry of revisionist accounts appeared -- most prominent of them the massive "Churchill: The End of Glory," by maverick scholar John Charmley, who argued that Britain's victory came at a steep price -- the loss of its Empire, its financial enslavement to the United States and the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In a review of Charmley's book, the Tory rascal Alan Clark argued that Churchill should have negotiated with Hitler (thus preserving the Empire), which set off a blazing row in the British media.

Though Charmley did not put the matter in such stark terms, his book ends on the most skeptical of notes, that Churchill's finest hour concealed the seed of Britain's own decline: "Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an 'anti-Socialist ' vision of Britain. By July 1945 the first of these was on the skid, the second was dependent solely on America and the third had just vanished in a Labour victory. [I]t was indeed the end of glory."

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