And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously re-worded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The Prime Minister scrawled across the page, “This is nonsense up with which I will not put.

In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. “It makes no difference,” Winston replied wryly. “The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.

Obviously it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment. One might as well try to photograph nostalgia or submit passion as an exhibit. Honor, integrity, and love – and hate – cannot be pierced with thumbtacks and displayed on bulletin boards. Yet all exist. Some motives reside beyond the rules of evidence.

Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: “The Unnecessary War.

The truth is so precious,” Churchill told Stalin, “that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.

They were following their prime minister, matching their government’s mood.

One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society.

He loved books and wrote of them: “if you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle or, as it were, fondle them: peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what it is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends. Let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.

A man is all the people he has been. Some recollections never die. They lie in one’s subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.

Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.