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Churchill’s Citadel By Katherine Carter Yale, 432 pages, 30

- LARRY P. ARNN

KATHERINE Carter is the chief curator at the best site for entering into the life and mind of Winston Churchill.

That site is not No. 10 Downing Street or the always-crowded Churchill War Rooms that sprawl beneath London's streets. It is Churchill's home, Chartwell, a country house 26 miles southeast of London in the countryside of Kent. There Churchill wrote books, played with his children, painted, laid brick, dug ponds and talked to his pigs. Most vitally-as Ms.

Carter shows throughout "Churchill's Citadel" it was there that Churchill held conversations that helped fashion him into a great world leader.

Ms. Carter organizes her book around 12 prominent visitors to Chartwell over the course of the 1930s-the period of "the gathering storm." They hailed from Britain, of course, and the U.S., France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and China. Their conversations with Churchill often took place in his dining room, with visitors sitting in chairs he had personally designed. Many of his interlocutors were-like Churchill himself for much of the 1930s-fighting for their political (or literal) survival or had been stigmatized for their opinions about the Nazi threat. Their vindication, like Churchill's, would come barely in time to save Western civilization.