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

Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you don’t frighten the horses.”

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, t

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 me

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

The five members of MI(R)c were hard at work on the afternoon of 10 November when Jefferis’s telephone rang unexpectedly. The caller did not identify himself and nor did he give any indication as to why he was phoning. He simply ordered Jefferis to attend an important meeting in Whitehall. When Jefferis pressed for further information, he was told

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 expec