Q & A

After visiting WSC in bed, while mopping a sign of Toby’s affections off his head, Butler sighed patiently: “The things I do for England.”

Did Churchill turn somersaults over the Soviets? Yes and with good reason. We understand events better through good historians, and hindsight.

Joseph Kennedy or the French generals? The origins of a famous oratorical flourish, on how Britain turned out to be one tough chicken.

If any one event ended imperial Britain, it was Suez, which also saw last significant intervention by Winston Churchill in world affairs.

Churchill took criticisms of his Fulton speech calmly, and never backed off. He knew he’d been right & within three years he was vindicated.

Churchill’s political imagination allowed him to portray the implausibility of reality: a crucially different turn of history at Gettysburg.

Churchill's best war books: “fascinating products of the human spirit, epic tales filled with the depravities, miseries, and glories of man.”

Churchill believed medical advances were “the inheritance of all,” and advocated insurance against illness; he was also mindful of its cost to taxpayers.

Despite his encomiums to Joan, Churchill rated Napoleon higher, with Georges Clemenceau a close third—and, a bit farther down, de Gaulle.

Churchill’s comments on the V1 reveal a rare quality: a genuine appreciation of enemy cleverness, albeit overwhelmed by “mass effects.”

Questions on the role of secretary Elizabeth Layton in the 2017 film, and the Annexe where Churchill really ran the wartime government.

Churchill never said this: he was far too fastidious to apply such a term generically. He knew his fascists, and identified them more specifically.