43. Andrew Roberts: Halifax “made the disastrous error of trying to translate his Indian experiences of dealing with Congress into policy dealing with the problems of Europe” (The Holy Fox, 41). Kenneth Rose: “What tarnishes the memory of the so-called appeasers is not that they were deterred from robustness by the strategic and economic realities of a defence policy; it is the sycophancy with which they witnessed the creeping enslavement of Europe” (King George V, 84).

44. But Churchill also knew that the limits of the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe ought to be defined and kept as far from the center as possible (in this the Americans did not support him) and that, as he said to de Gaulle in November 1944, this Russian rule would not last (“After the meal comes the digestion period”). To Colville, on New Year’s Day in 1953, he predicted that by the 1980s Communism would disappear from Eastern Europe.