The lives of those maverick creators who shunt human life forwards are often touched by tragedy, genius, poverty and, afterwards, immortality. Not untypical was a Swede, born in obscurity in 1833, who was given to periods of depression, remained a solitary character, never wed but had at least three amours who rejected his marriage proposals. He was one of eight children, of whom only four reached adulthood, whose father had been forced into bankruptcy. Never attending university, he drifted around the world throughout his life, picking up enviable fluency in Swedish, French, Russian, English, German, and Italian. Principally an inventor who eventually amassed 355 patents, but blessed with entrepreneurial skill, he also wrote poetry and prose in multiple languages, and evolved into a Renaissance man who might have triumphed in any one of a dozen different disciplines.

As it was, in 1867 his fertile mind led him to devise detonators using copper capsules of mercury fulminate, which, when triggered by a fuse, exploded the blasting powder dynamite, which he also invented and patented in the same year. Gelignite followed in 1875, and, in 1887, ballistite, the precursor of smokeless powder explosives including cordite, which is still used as a solid-fuel rocket propellant today. By the time of his death in San Remo in December 1896, he owned Bofors, the world’s oldest armaments factory and Björkborn Manor, his last home in Sweden; he had invested in oil companies in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan; and had established more than 90 explosives and armament factories worldwide.

A conflicted man, who became one of the world’s wealthiest through devising the most effective means for mankind to slay their fellows, in larger numbers and quicker than ever before, his conscience weighed heavily. He had initially developed his ideas for use in quarrying and mining, but they were soon adopted by many nations for military purposes. His personal philosophy embraced the notion that the scientist was not responsible for how his studies were applied. To him, each discovery was neutral, capable of good and ill use.

As far back as 1876, he was on record as wishing to produce such a devastating material or machine that it would render war impossible. In 1891, he commented that his dynamite factories might ‘put an end to war sooner than congresses: on the day two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror, and disband their troops’. He did not live to see these aspirations become irrelevant during the First World War, or witness the deterrent concept of atomic weapons reborn for the Cold War.

Deeply pacifist, yet widely known as a merchant of death, whose inventions in his lifetime influenced the outcomes of many major conflicts, including the 1853-56 Crimean campaigns, the 1861-65 American Civil War, and the 1870-71 clash between France and Prussia, he donated generously to the Austrian peace movement and Lutheran Church, perhaps by way of an afterlife insurance policy. Like his predecessor, Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836), founder of the British branch of the international banking family, and Nobel’s near contemporaries, Sir William Armstrong (1810-1900) and Alfred Krupp (1812-87), his business activities and design successes were totally reliant on their astute monitoring of international politics, via a vast network of carefully cultivated informants.

On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, the inventor signed his last will, which unknown to his family, set aside 94 per cent of his net estate to establish five prizes, to be given annually without distinction of nationality. Since 1901, the awards established by Alfred Nobel (1833-96) have been honouring men and women from around the world whose works reflect his own interests. His instructions were that recipients ‘during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace’. In 1969, a sixth prize was added. Sweden’s Central Bank, in celebration of its tercentenary, established the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences, in Memory of Alfred Nobel’.

One of Nobel’s initiatives was the employment of academics to study procedures of conflict resolution, the establishment of an international court, and other concepts connected with ‘collective security’. His peace prize was to be awarded ‘to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition, or reduction, of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.

Twenty-five years ago, I was invited by the UK Foreign Office to participate in a Wilton Park conference. Inspired by Winston Churchill, these had begun in January 1946 to help replant the seeds of German democracy after the Second World War. They take their name from the 18th-century Wilton Park Estate, near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, where Nazi prisoners of war were interrogated and their conversations bugged. After the Second World War, the house was used by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to re-educate around 6,000 German internees, preparing them to re-establish their nation’s political credentials.

To grapple with 21st-century geopolitical issues, Wilton Park’s international dialogues continue, though in 1951 its gatherings were moved to Wiston House, one of the great stately homes of Sussex, a rival to Petworth, Parham and Uppark. A 16th-century, Grade One listed house set in the South Downs National Park, surrounded by over 6,000 acres of parkland, Wiston’s aim is to provide a neutral environment where conflicting views can be discussed. Today, policymakers and opinion-formers from around the world debate peacekeeping and poverty, sustainability and human rights at Wiston, which operates as an agency of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. My contribution was about peace enforcement, for I had just returned from Bosnia as NATO’s historian.

I remember the Foreign Office driver taking me along the A283 Washington to Steyning road. Suddenly, under the lee of Chanctonbury Hill, we turned right down an unremarkable minor road that led for miles until the most superb Elizabethan country house flanked by its own chapel came into view. Touched by every era of history, the land was once owned by Earl Godwin, father of King Harold, who died at Hastings in 1066; its Domesday Book entry of 20 years later listed 24 tenants and seven plough teams, value 12 pounds.

After its residents were almost wiped out by the Black Death, Wiston was rebuilt by a wealthy courtier in 1573-75. Contested throughout the Civil War era, it was bought in 1649 by the ancestors of Sir Charles Goring, whose descendants still own Wiston today and lease it to the Foreign Office. In the 1830s, the architect Edward Blore remodelled the mansion, but fortunately his proposal to leave the Elizabethan house as a picturesque ruin while he built a new home nearby was resisted. It is a Wodehousian Garden of Eden, rarely open and therefore almost unknown to the public, where pretty cottages once housing the estate’s gamekeepers, millers and carpenters, brickmakers, beekeepers and brewers, blacksmiths and grooms, nestle into the rolling, tree-studded landscape.

I discovered that I was being hosted by the charming Odvar Nordli (1927-2018), former Cold War-era prime minister of Norway from 1976-81, and later vice president of the Storting (Norwegian parliament) from 1981-85. As a seasoned politician and negotiator, he occasionally joined the Foreign Office at Wiston, and expertly steered my session through a myriad of questions before we adjourned for dinner.

Afterwards, sinking into armchairs in the great hall, we began to talk about Churchill’s original purpose for the conferences. ‘I met him, you know, when I was a young man in my twenties. Later I read how he got his Nobel Prize. Most interesting.’ The conversation took an unexpected turn when I discovered Nordli had been a member of the five-man Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee from 1985-96, appointed by the Storting. It was an arduous task, Odvar recounted, for he and his colleagues had to confirm and oversee announcements of all the awards, as well as choosing the peace-prize winner.

Nordli explained that whereas Nobel’s instructions required Swedish prize-awarding institutions to decide on the annual awards for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature, with the winners being honoured in Stockholm, the peace prize was awarded by a committee chosen by the Norwegian Storting, comprising five politicians from different parties, and presented in Oslo. For peace prize nominations, Odvar told me, inquiries were sent to governments, former laureates, and current or former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, with a deadline of 31 January each year for the return of the nomination forms. This can garner up to 300 different names, though nominees are not publicly identified, nor told they are under active consideration.

The peace prize panel then meets monthly from February to hammer out a unanimous choice by October. Nordli observed that although records are closed to the public for 50 years, as a member of the governing committee he had spent many an enjoyable hour perusing them. Vociferous debates take place before a winning candidate emerges, a process that he thought resembled nothing less than the Catholic cardinals choosing a new pope.

And so we came to Churchill. Odvar told me his reading showed that not only did the Norwegian Committee fail to award the Peace Prize on 19 occasions after 1901, particularly during the two world wars, but Churchill was twice nominated, in 1945 and 1950. He was unsuccessful on both occasions, but there was plenty of evidence he had been actively lobbying for it. Even with their close ties to Britain during the war, and King George VI’s hosting of the Norwegian royal family during the German occupation, the more Churchill pushed for the peace prize, the more the Norwegian committee grew irritated and sought alternatives.

They did not want to feel railroaded, and to assert their independence from the pugnacious Winston and his friends, awarded it in 1945 to the Roosevelt’s former Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, ‘for his indefatigable work in promoting international understanding, and his pivotal role in establishing the United Nations’. In 1950 another American, Ralph Bunche, received it ‘for his work as mediator in Palestine in 1948-1949’. The distinguished Bunche was a leading figure in the early United Nations, the later Civil Rights movement, and the first person of African descent to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

However, Nordli revealed, the archives also proved that after 1945 there was a lobby for Churchill to be nominated for the Literature Prize. The letter that swung it for Churchill came from Birger Nerman, a well-known archaeologist who was director of the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm and, as a member of the Swedish Academy of Letters, invited to submit nominations. Nerman’s letter – a copy of which the writer later sent to Churchill – was three pages long and revealed the author had nominated Winston each year since 1948.

Nerman’s 1953 recommendation commented on each of Churchill’s books and collections of speeches, which he thought ‘expressive of the eternal heroism of the human spirit… the writings exhibited those high, inalienable human virtues of courage, chivalry and truth’. Nordli remembered there were 34 nominations for the 1953 literature prize, for 25 different people, but Nerman’s was the only one for Churchill. Coming from a distinguished Swede, it was decisive.

In 1953, the year of his Nobel triumph, Churchill was up against the stiff competition of 13 others, including Ernest Hemingway (who got it the following year), Walter de la Mare, Graham Greene and Robert Frost. The prize committee cited his ‘his mastery of historical and biographical description, as well as brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’. Nordli took this to mean it was Churchill’s rousing wartime speeches that tipped the balance in his favour, ‘which was an interesting interpretation of literature’.

The recipient was unwell at the time of the award that December, so his wife Clemmie and daughter Mary flew to Stockholm to collect it on his behalf. By his death in 1965, he had published one novel, 30 non-fiction books, and 27 volumes of speeches, in addition to thousands of newspaper dispatches, book chapters and magazine articles. Nordli later learned from Churchill’s private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, that his master was ‘disappointed it wasn’t the peace prize, for he deeply wished to be remembered as a peacemaker’.

I’m sorry Odvar Nordli is no longer with us, for it would have been fascinating to chew over with him recent Nobel winners, in the comfort of Wiston’s deep armchairs opposite a roaring fire. This year, the Norwegian Committee came under unprecedented pressure to award its peace prize to President Trump. The American leader’s desire for something his money could not buy seemed motivated by the Nobel Committee’s controversial 2009 award to Barack Obama for his ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people, promotion of nuclear non-proliferation, and a new climate in international relations in reaching out to the Muslim world’. Obama subsequently donated the 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1 million), which is gifted to every laureate, to charity.

Announced during his first year in office, Obama was the fourth US president to receive a peace prize (the others being Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter). Churchill’s failure to receive the same honour is illustrative of the fact that Nobel peace awards are not box-ticking exercises for leaders of the free world. It isn’t a case of ‘stop seven wars and win a prize’. Recall Nobel’s original direction that recipients should have done their very best for international fraternity, the abolition or reduction of military forces and promotion of peace congresses. Apart from 28 institutions that have been awarded the prize (including the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, thrice), we can see that they are often awarded to ‘underdogs’ – the unentitled, who express a selfless vision of a better, closer world, a degree of humility, and attachment to de-escalation and global bodies such as the United Nations.

Instead of Trump, this year’s winner, the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, seemed pitch-perfect. She received the victor’s laurels ‘for her tireless work promoting democratic rights in Venezuela and struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy’. As the Nobel press release observed: ‘she is a brave and committed champion of peace, a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness’.

In failing to get the peace prize, like Winston Churchill, the American president might alternatively hope for the literature prize. But I’m not sure how the 22 volumes so far credited to Donald Trump will be received by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy of Letters. The Art of the Deal, anyone?