Historians and many members of the public already know that Winston Churchill often took high-stakes gambles in his political life. Some, like the disastrous Dardanelles campaign-an audacious attempt he masterminded at the Admiralty to seize the straits of Gallipoli and knock Turkey out of the first world war-he got wrong. Others, notably his decision as prime minister in 1940 to hold out against Nazi Germany until America came to rescue Britain, he got spectacularly right. But the extent to which Churchill was a gambler in other spheres of his life has tended not to catch his biographers' attention.
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