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The Liberal Party's enlightened ideas on taxation and liberty were understood by Churchill, Hill writes: but not, unfortunately, by many of his colleagues.

The crippled President claimed Leahy was his “leg man,” but really used him to help understand complex military issues associated with waging a world war against two technologically advanced and aggressive nations. Leahy was also to serve as the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff above General Marshall, Admiral King, and General Arnold of the Army Air Corps. Leahy rarely took a contentious point of view during JCS deliberations. Instead he preferred to persuade FDR in private on courses of action he favored.

Churchill’s is largely a military account, with sentiments that that surprise some. “We march with Lee and Jackson, with Stuart, with Longstreet, and with Early through autumn woodlands…. Virginia, the proud Founder State…trampled upon, disinherited, impoverished, riven asunder….” Yet Churchill is not pro-Confederacy. His instincts were always with liberty.

In 1942 Churchill broadcast on a four-year plan for postwar reconstruction, including what he called “the spacious domain of public health…. I was brought up on the maxim of Lord Beaconsfield which my father was always repeating: ‘Health and the laws of health’…. Here let me say there is no finer investment in any community than putting milk into babies. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”

Clement Attlee once quipped that Churchill’s History should have been entitled, “Things in History Which Interested Me.” Unconsciously Attlee identified the value of history written by one who made it. Churchill writes from his own experience. He understood defending human freedom, and fighting with one’s back to the wall.

“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” (Mark 3:25). Given renewed fame by Lincoln, the verse applies as well to the Wars of the Roses. Their vicious course saw the old order passing to something entirely new. The tragic events are a reminder: The familiarity of Churchill's words is uncanny given the rampant social, political, and ideological divisions in Western countries. Churchill calls us to learn from the tragedies of the past to avoid experiencing a similar upheaval.

Did Operation Mincemeat actually reduce the German defense of Sicily? At least one source says Hitler fell for it. If so, the Führer confirmed Churchill’s opinion of “that form of warlike genius by which Corporal Schicklgruber has so notably contributed to our victory.”

Roosevelt always favored a “Germany First” strategy, even after Pearl Harbor. This is shown by his “disinformation” campaign that Germany was really behind the Japanese attack. He intended using Hitler’s alleged involvement in Pearl Harbor as a pretext for war, even if Germany did not declare war on the U.S.

Channon, a superb diarist, had an extraordinary ability to capture and present the interesting. One can only admire the energy it must have taken simply to make hand-written daily, mostly lengthy, entries, amidst the social whirlwind in which he lived. Two thousand pages in, and we are left yearning for more. Luckily a third, and final, installment is due out later this year.

"Poy was not unlike a modern Aesop, who drew the simple truth with devastating clearness. Looking at any of his pictures you laugh because of their very rightness. It is only afterwards that you realise the brilliance of the drawing, and are staggered by the genius that created it.”

How the exotic variety of Churchill’s hats enthralled generations of cartoonists; and how “Punch” had a field day for 80 years.

There was “much fog on all sides,” but the United States agreed to share atomic bomb secrets with Britain—and no one else.