Quotes from Andrew Roberts

Not suppliant: never that. Defiant, unconquerable

so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its possibilities.4 Halder told Lieutenant-General Kurt Dittmar of OKH that Hitler 'was a mystic, who tended to discount, even when he did not disregard, all the

Chequers and No. 10 enjoyed surprisingly haphazard security against assassination and terrorism. John Martin recalled that there was a competition in the Foreign Office to see who could get into Downing Street with the least adequate credentials. A railway season ticket and golf club membership card were runners-up, but 'finally the prize went to a man who walked confidently through the entrance holding out a slice of cake.

Churchill was generally accused of being a reactionary warmonger who failed to appreciate the Russian sacrifices in the war, and the essentially benevolent nature of 'Uncle Joe'. Even today, revisionist historians still sometimes blame Churchill for launching the Cold War with the Iron Curtain speech, rather than pointing out that there was already one being fought, which the West was losing.

The movie Waterloo Bridge (1940), starring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor, was a stern defence of British decency and values.

Fortune is a liberal mistress; I have often said so, and now begin to experience

Fortune is a liberal mistress; I have often said so, and now begin to experience it.

There are two people who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot,' he said. 'You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.

Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre,' he wrote in The World Crisis. 'The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.

We were always taught as historians, or at least I was at university, never to use the word 'inevitable', because nothing is inevitable in history. And that's true, except for German counterattack.

set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.

I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter; I have retained something which is to me of great value Ã¢â'¬â€œ I can still walk about the world with my head erect.'235 'My dear Duff,' Churchill wrote to him, 'Your speech was one of the finest Parliamentary performances I have ever heard. It was admirable in form, massive in argument and shone with courage and public spirit.'236

Palabras pulcramente escogidas; frases de cuidada estructura; acumulación argumental; empleo de la analogía; despliegue de excentricidades... Esos son los cinco mimbres retóricos del mayor orador de su generación.

He privately remarked that Boothby 'should join a bomb disposal squad as the best way of rehabilitating himself in the eyes of his fellow men. After all, the bombs might not go off.'133 It sounded cruel, but that is much what he himself had done in 1915, when the six-week average life-expectancy for new officers on the Western Front was not dissimilar to that of bomb-disposal squads in the Second World War.

The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.'41

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill had made about 1,700 speeches and travelled about 82,000 miles – over three times the circumference of the earth – to deliver them. It was an extraordinary display of energy, far more than normal politicians even of the front rank. He had become a vastly experienced and assured public speaker, capable of gauging any audience in an instant.

Churchill described the Russian Revolution as 'a tide of ruin in which perhaps a score of millions of human beings have been engulfed. The consequences of these events … will darken the world for our children's children.'155 This was both prophetic and numerically precise – at least twenty million people died under Soviet tyranny – yet his anti-Communism was to cost him a great deal politically.

General Konstantin Rokossovsky, one of those who were tortured during that time – though not shot despite his Polish origins – later said that purges were even worse for morale than when artillery fired on one's own troops because it would have to have been very accurate artillery fire

the message 'Stay put' which would be sent out by the Ministry of Information in the event of a German invasion. 'First of all, it is American slang; secondly, it does not express the fact. The people have not been "put" anywhere. What is the matter with "Stand fast", or "Stand firm"? Of the two I prefer the latter.

In the calendar year 1943, when 70,000 Western servicemen, including bomber crews, died fighting Germany, two million Russian soldiers were killed, nearly thirty times the number.

Fear and uncertainty accelerate the fall of empires: they are a thousand times more fatal than the dangers and losses of an ill-fated war.' Napoleon, statement in the Moniteur, December 1804

Napoleón dijo en una ocasión que «para entender a un hombre hay que observar cómo era el mundo a sus veinte años».

The paternalist in Churchill wanted, in Masterman's critical but essentially accurate phrase, 'a state of things where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to an industrious, bien pensant, and grateful working class'.

I am thankful in the circumstances we have not got Winston as a colleague. He is in his usual excited condition that comes on him when he smells war, and if he were in the Cabinet we should be spending all our time in holding him down instead of getting on with our business.