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Episode 8 of "The Wilderness Years" captures a dramatic scene from Churchill’s memoirs. Chamberlain, he wrote, “had scarcely ceased speaking when a strange, prolonged, wailing noise, afterwards to become familiar, broke upon the ear. My wife came into the room braced by the crisis [and] we made our way to the shelter assigned to us, armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts.” There, to his astonishment, Churchill is cheered by Londoners.

Britain’s surrender of military parity with Germany is nowhere better illustrated than through these episodes recalling the events of 1937-38.

Flying Peril: The threat of a German air force superior to Britain’s, denied for years by British leaders, proved only too true. This fifth episode of “The Wilderness Years” introduces two of the people who, at the risk of their careers, provided Churchill with secret information on German rearmament.

In Munich on 30 August 1932, six months before Hitler took power in Germany, Winston Churchill came as close as he ever would to meeting Hitler face to face, amid sobering scenes of marching, chanting brownshirts singing Die Horst Wessel Lied.

The “golden years” are not always golden, but Winston Churchill’s long life offers perspective and encouragement to those of “a certain age.”

Ever since the producers of “The Wilderness Years” television documentary (1982) took liberties by suggesting that Wigram was a suicide, it has been broadly accepted as fact. Indeed recently another myth was layered on to this one: that Wigram’s parents didn’t attend his funeral in Sussex because suicide was proscribed by the Church.

“It is an experience I shall never forget,” said filmscript editor Lajos Biró. “He wrote a story that was the perfect basis for a film... I had to add nothing…. I tell you, a tremendous film writer is lost in Churchill. He has absolutely no vanity. He wants to learn and to tell. I came away dazed.”

From Cromwell’s example, Churchill learned the inefficacy of appeasement when dealing with despotism. Cromwell also reified the beauty and fragility of free government: Should one adopt a wrong policy or allow civil war and division to rule the day, a Cromwellian demagogue may be the necessary—and simultaneously evil—solution.

Churchill’s virtues included the acceptance of defeats as necessary to wielding power; a tough but generous relation with rivals in politics, magnanimity toward a defeated enemy; a willingness to experiment; and above all, in the supreme crisis, an absolute refusal to compromise or surrender. From all this, there is powerful evidence to support Isaiah Berlin’s judgment of him as “the largest human being of our time.”

During Celia’s childhood she spent time with her grandfather at Chartwell and Chequers. At Chartwell, Celia and her sister slept in a room above Churchill’s. The girls would go in to say good morning to Winston and Clementine in their separate bedrooms. She says “we saw a great deal of our grandparents.”

“Reilly considered Churchill the only useful British politician in the anti-Bolshevik cause. Shortly before his death he told a friend: ‘Only one man is really important, and that is the irrepressible Marlborough [WSC]. I have always remained on good terms with him….His ear would always be open to something sound.’”

Churchill was a powerful advocate of the nation-state. The EU is not one, but Ukraine has shown that it is. Day after day, in their streets and suburbs and forests, ordinary Ukrainians are showing that they believe it is a real country. They would not be fighting and dying if they did not believe this.