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, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher