Did Margaret Thatcher make a difference to the 1980s? Did Churchill win World War II? What was Gladstone's contribution to liberalism? Were these leaders the product of their time and their parties or did they create them in their own likeness? This book examines these questions in a series of portraits of the formative politicians of the last hundred years. There are chapters on Gladstone, Salisbury, Joe Chamberlain, Asquith and Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, Maynard Keynes (who, though not a politician, set the agenda for 50 years), Dalton, Attlee, Macmillan, Bevan and Gaitskell, Wilson and Thatcher. The author also wrote The Keynesian Revolution in the Making 1924-1936