Winston Churchill (1874–1965)

Winston Churchill saved his country with sentences. This is not a metaphor. In June 1940, with the British army just lifted off the beaches at Dunkirk, France collapsing and senior members of his own government arguing that a negotiated peace was the only rational option, Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and said: "We shall fight on the beaches." The country read him, heard him repeated, and changed its mind about what was possible.

His prose is deliberate architecture: Anglo-Saxon simplicity inside a formal Latinate frame, the short word beside the long, the plain statement beside the periodic sentence. He understood, as few politicians have, that rhetoric is not decoration but decision — that the sentence which cannot be doubted creates the action it describes.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, for his historical writings. The committee praised his "mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory." He was the only British prime minister to win it.

He gave no Nobel Lecture and was not at the banquet; his wife, Clementine, read his speech (1953). In it he tells the Academy: "I feel we are both running a considerable risk." Read it at NobelPrize.org.