So much has been written about Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that they are in danger of being buried under the weight of words. Richard Vinen has had the good idea of producing a relatively short introduction to the pair. It does not seek to rival the huge individual biographies that already exist, let alone François Kersaudy’s magisterial joint study Churchill and De Gaulle. Rather, it is a kind of meditation, drawing out key themes in the lives of the two men who in 1940 embodied the spirit of resistance to Nazism, each seeing it as his fate to be the saviour of his nation. Churchill said that, upon becoming prime minister, he felt as if he were ‘walking with destiny’. And he recognised de Gaulle, self-proclaimed leader of the Free French and guardian of the honour and soul of the eternal fatherland, as l’homme du destin.

De Gaulle’s faith in his destiny was even more extraordinary than that of Churchill, who, when Germany was poised to invade, woke every morning with dread in his heart and kept a cyanide pill handy in case he was captured. A refugee in London and about to embark on the seemingly impossible task of liberating France, de Gaulle likened himself to a man steeling himself to swim across an ocean. It was a telling image since, as Vinen says, he could barely swim. Harold Macmillan, Churchill’s minister in the Mediterranean, recalled plunging naked into the sea while de Gaulle, in full dress uniform, sat stolidly on a boulder. Once, when Churchill was home secretary, he fell into a stream. Since his clothes were now wet, he decided to have fun there, splashing about for half an hour and making dams with stones. At Chartwell in Kent, Churchill had a heated outdoor pool; for a time de Gaulle had no hot water in his house at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. The aristocratic epicurean was the living antithesis to the bourgeois stoic.

Churchill was squat, extravagant, quixotic and ebullient. De Gaulle was tall, austere, melancholic and aloof. Churchill was a cavalier, regarding war as a glorious adventure; he longed to fight as well as to direct. De Gaulle was a samurai who saw war as a stern duty; although as brave as