neither Churchill nor Truman had in their early life anyone to knock the corners off the knowledge they were solitarily and a little laboriously accumulating.

Churchill’s criticisms of this ‘monster’ were no doubt justified, although it could be commented that the only rival for vulnerability were great battleships, with the expensive ordering of which, within little more than a decade, he was to have a great deal to do.

And Lord Randolph’s elder brother was, in the words of an eminent modern historian, ‘one of the most disreputable men ever to have debased the highest rank in the British peerage’.1 He appropriately bore the name of Blandford, the title of the Marlborough heir, for most of his relatively short life, during which he was expelled from Eton, got

The dangers which threaten the tranquillity of the modern world come not from those powers that have become interdependent upon others, interwoven by commerce with other States; they come from those powers which are more or less detached, which stand more or less aloof from the general intercourse of mankind, and are comparatively independent and

‘We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.’

They may also have been influenced by a wonderfully rash and grandiose plan which he and a few other junior officers had been planning and to which he devoted five full pages of My Early Life. They would not just get over the fence and slip away. They would overpower the thirty rather dozy police guards, seize their arms, hurry to the race-course,

It is remarkable that the offspring of two such old libertines should have made one of the most famously long-lasting and faithful marriages in history.

12 Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, where he stayed until 1909.

Out of these pressures Churchill evolved two firm rules which he followed faithfully for the rest of his life. The first was that expenditure should be determined by needs (generously interpreted) rather than by resources. He stood the famous maxim of Dickens’s Mr Micawber on its head. Second, he decided that when the gap between income and