Winston Churchill

Before he was 26 Churchill had served as a cavalry officer in India and Sudan, charged at Omdurman, and become famous as a war correspondent in the Boer War for escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria. The books and lecture tours paid for his entry to Parliament in 1900. The military experience fed his confidence in strategy, for good in 1940 and for ill at Gallipoli, and his journalism made him a phrase-maker few politicians have matched.