Sublime

King George VI told his own diary, “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.” The king encountered Lord Halifax on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, through which Halifax had royal permission to walk in his commute from his home in Euston Square to the Foreign Office. “I met Halifax in the garden,” the king wrote, “& I told him I was sorry not to have

Where Chamberlain—the Old Umbrella, the Coroner—was staid and deliberate, the new prime minister, true to his reputation, was flamboyant, electric, and wholly unpredictable. One of Churchill’s first acts was to appoint himself minister of defense, which prompted an outgoing official to write in his diary, “Heaven help us.” The post was a new one,

News of the invasion reached Whitehall within hours, causing outright panic. Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition, immediately called up the War Office file on Norway, only to find that it was completely empty. On the cover were the cryptic letters SFA. ‘I suppose it means Sweet Fanny Adams,’ he said to Winston Churchill when the two of them

Gould did not take a title, but had a seat on the executive committee and had four additional board seats, which he filled with his brokers.

Britain’s topmost naval official, the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, sixty-five years old.

Despite American efforts the British position stiffened further. Churchill, scarcely a friend of decolonialization, defeated Attlee in the October 1951 general election, and his Conservative government was in no mood to compromise with Mossadegh. The British were fighting alongside the United States in Korea, Churchill reminded Truman, and he