George VI in the conventional parlance was a Good King who sacrificed his life to his sense of duty. If we are to have monarchs it would be hard to find a better one.

A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.

When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.

We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.