Fred Glueckstein

“King George’s reign has seen moral, social, political and scientific changes in the life of all countries and of all classes so decisive that we, borne along upon the still hurrying torrent, cannot even attempt to measure them. The means of locomotion, the art of flying, the position of women, the map of Europe, the aims and ideals of all nations—East and West, white and black, brown and yellow—have undergone a prodigious transformation.” —WSC

“It is an experience I shall never forget,” said filmscript editor Lajos Biró. “He wrote a story that was the perfect basis for a film... I had to add nothing…. I tell you, a tremendous film writer is lost in Churchill. He has absolutely no vanity. He wants to learn and to tell. I came away dazed.”

As war approached, Eden and Churchill developed an increasingly close friendship. Churchill Eden “was a devoted adherent of the French Entente…he was anxious to have more intimate relations with Soviet Russia. He felt and feared the Hitler peril. It might almost be said that there was not much difference of view between him and me, except, of course that he was in harness.”

“From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses…. Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.” —WSC

Anthony Eden shared Free Trade principles, but was at first a Churchill critic. During the Dardanelles Campaign he wrote: “Why can’t W. Churchill look [Navy ships] instead of making strategical plans about which he knows nothing about at all?” Later they became allies, Eden remarking on Churchill’s “masterly performance” as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Lady Violet: “He had no doubts about his star. He felt that he had been preserved through many perils in order to fulfil its purpose.”

Violet Asquith, 1906: “I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met…”

Throwback to vanished age, Sassoon served his country in war and peace, and entertained the glitterati at his palatial mansions. He died too young.

Churchill’s friendship with H.G. Wells spanned forty years, and his enthusiasm for the writer’s work went back to “The Time Machine,” Wells’s first novel, published 1895.