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“... young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir JohnColville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just completed the Foreword to the book ...”

“... comes his only son, Malcolm, born on the bonny banks of Lochranza, the beauty of which inspired Sir Walter Scott to the curmudgeonly reflection that ‘wake where’er he may, man wakes to care and toil.’ So it proved with the Macmillans. Malcolm prospered though hard work on his poor land, becoming a tacks man, a kulak among crofters, who served as an ...”

“... a bit of a lightweight, a ‘natural number two’ who should never have become prime minister. John Grigg wrote of him before the Suez crisis: ‘Popularity means much more to him than it ever should mean to a statesman. Since the early days, when he was idolised by millions on account of his personal appearance and blameless views, he has never lost the ...”

“... over the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events ...”

“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and ...”

“... Except for two years as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page ...”

“... troops had already advanced from Basra to Baghdad, and the capture of Palestine was imminent. Sir Edmund Allenby, the commander-in-chief in Egypt, had been told to take Jerusalem by Christmas. Wavell’s task was to act as the liaison officer between Allenby and the War Office, and he was present when British troops advanced through Gaza and ...”

“... alive!’ All he can do is open a bottle of Krug 1920 as he, Butler, Alec Dunglass and Jock Colville, ‘four loyal adherents of Mr Chamberlain’, drink ‘to the king over the water’.During the first eighteen months of the war, Channon travelled twice to Yugoslavia – whose prince regent, Paul Karadjordjević, was his old Oxford friend and ‘the ...”