Opening paragraphs.....

     The first olive moments of daylight, anticipating the imminent appearance of the sun over the English Channel, disclose a wide, misty, green plain descending to the South Downs and the sea.  This is the great Weald of Kent.  It is a peculiarity of the Weald's terrain - demonstrated in the shrouded past by Romans, Saxons, and Normans - that it would be quite defenseless should an enterprising foe cross the Channel.  Were any force to prepare for an invasion, its campfires on the far shore would be visible from nearby Dover.  But now, fourteen years after the Armistice of 1918, the Weald is an idyll of peace, and the explorer on foot finds that it possesses camouflaged delights.  Its smooth breast, for example, is not entirely unbroken.  The pastureland, sloping upwards towards London, is cleaved by a shallow valley.  This combe rises to a timbered crest.  There among eighty sheltering acres of beech, oak, lime, and chestnut, stands the singular country home of England's most singular statesman, a brilliant, domineering, intuitive, inconsiderate, self-centered, emotional, generous, ruthless, visionary, megalomaniacal, and heroic genius who inspires fear, devotion, rage, and admiration among his peers.

-William Manchester,
The Last Lion:  Winston Spencer Churchill:  Alone: 1932-1940