Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome

[Churchill] had been a man not only whose intimate links with history ran back to the last cavalry charge at Omdurman, in the year of the death of Gladstone - but whose lifespan connected the present with that of millions who had been contemporary with Palmerston and Peel and the Duke of Wellington, and even with hundreds of thousands still alive in his youth, who had lived in the time of Napoleon, Beethoven and George III. In Britain's last great crisis as an imperial world power, Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome, as a man who derived his majesty from a sense of imperial and military splendour of the past

Christopher Booker, in R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 490