Book excerpt: 1945 was a chaotic year, both for the world and for Winston Churchill. Soon after the death of Roosevelt, Churchill arrived at the Potsdam Conference expecting to broker peace with Stalin and Truman, only to find himself unable to attend the final summit sessions following a notoriously lopsided General Election result. Having spent the late 1930s warning of Nazism, Churchill found himself again sounding the alarm about the Communist threat to the freedom that he and his Allies had won at such a cost.