Winston Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 in Oxfordshire, of mixed English and American parentage. He went to Harrow School, joined the British Army in 1895, and became famous as a war correspondent before being elected to Parliament in 1900. He sat as an MP for some 62 of the years between 1900 and 1964.
He was prime minister from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Between his two terms he wrote several books about the war, and in 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on 24 January 1965.