“My job was to try and oil the wheels between the British and the Americans.  After that first dinner with the President, I used to go out to Hyde Park at weekends.  There were always Roosevelts there, and people like…

Colville noted that Chamberlain “likes to be set on a pedestal and adored, with suitable humility, by unquestioning admirers.”[1]  As Prime Minister, however, Chamberlain collected critics.  One Conservative ally of Chamberlain noted that the Prime Minister “engendered personal dislike among…

In early 1941, defeated Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie visited London.  He took with him a handwritten note from the American President  for the British Prime Minister.  Franklin D. Roosevelt had written out five lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem…

As a young politician, Abraham Lincoln had said: “I know the American People are much attached to their Government; – I know they would suffer much for its sake; – I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before…

Both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill were pacers.  Lincoln paced in hall of the second floor of the White House, usually at night.  Churchill paced in the Great Hall of Chequers, the Prime Minister’s weekend getaway – even later at…

In December 1941, just seventeen days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the National Geographic Society delivered a map cabinet to the White House.  Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed the gift, which was installed in the second floor study where…

Isaiah Berlin in War Latvian-borne Oxford academic Isaiah Berlin was a intellectual fox with many talents. Berlin loved to talk, but he was an even more skilled writer and political analyst. In the summer of 1940, the Russian-speaking Berlin was…