Mohandas Gandhi and Winston Churchill: India's moral leader and Great Britain's greatest Prime Minister. Born five years and seven thousand miles apart, they became embodiments of the nations they led. Both became living icons, idolized and admired around the world. Today, they remain enduring models of leadership in a democratic society.

Yet the truth was Churchill and Gandhi were bitter enemies throughout their lives. This book reveals, for the first time, how that rivalry shaped the twentieth century and beyond. For more than forty years, from 1906 to 1948, Gandhi and Churchill were locked in a tense struggle for the hearts and minds of the British public, and of world opinion. Although they met only once, their titanic contest of wills would decide the fate of nations, continents, peoples, and ultimately an Empire.

Here is a sweeping epic with a fascinating supporting cast, and a brilliant narrative parable of two men whose great successes were always haunted by personal failure - and whose final moments of triumph were overshadowed by the loss of what they held most dear.