ABSTRACT
The war accelerated the break-up of the British Empire and forced upon Great Britain a reassessment of its place in the world. The wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, after the Labour government was elected in 1945, devoted much of his time to writing a six-volume history of The Second World War (1945-54) and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (four volumes; 1956-58). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
