He served as Home Secretary (1910–11) under the Liberals and as First Lord of the Admiralty 1911–15, but lost this post after the unsuccessful Allied attack on the Turks in the Dardanelles. A consistent opponent of appeasement between the wars, he replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister of the coalition government in 1940 and led Britain throughout the war, forging and maintaining the alliance which defeated the Axis Powers. His writings include The Second World War (1948–53) and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-8); he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.