Andrew Roberts
Churchill
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same … Rudyard Kipling, (Location 568)
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Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft. (Location 569)
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‘He explained to me that he was able to handle all these affairs at the centre, because his whole life had been a training for the high office he had filled during the war.’ (Location 584)
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‘I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour (Location 594)
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‘We shape our buildings,’ Winston Churchill was later to say, ‘and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ (Location 639)
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‘You are one of the few who have it in their power to bestow judgments which I respect,’ (Location 722)
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‘The Army, of course, so long as there’s any fighting to be had. When that’s over, I shall have a shot at politics.’ (Location 943)
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‘to sleep tonight under the influence of victory which is the best narcotic in the world’. (Location 961)
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great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger – London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London. I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future. This country will be subjected somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and England from disaster … dreams of the future are blurred but the main objective is clear. I repeat – London will be in danger and in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the capital and save the Empire.85 (Location 971)
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‘I am always ready to learn,’ Churchill was to say in 1952, ‘although I do not always like being taught.’ (Location 977)
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The neglect and emotional cruelty at the hands of his parents that could have crushed a lesser person instead gave Churchill an unquenchable desire to succeed in life, not only in general but in his father’s chosen profession of politics. (Location 1156)
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Churchill told the parliamentary lobby correspondent A. G. Gardiner that he had copied his father’s practice of using pauses while speaking, even of deliberately fumbling in his pockets for a note he did not want or need, in order to concentrate his listeners’ attention. (Location 1162)
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