Really Very Exhilarating 
R.W. Johnson
- The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made by Simon Ball Buy this book
Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War.
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R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.
Other articles by this contributor:
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda