Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table by Cita Stelzer Page A

and no one in their right mind would begrudge him a mouthful of Beef Wellington or a drop of 1870 brandy as he did so.
    One area in which Stelzer’s scholarship makes an invaluable contribution to the protection of Churchill’s reputation lies in her demolition of the arguments of those who accuse him of chronic alcoholism. Adolf Hitler was obsessed byChurchill’s drinking, describing him on various occasions as an “insane drunkard”, a “garrulous drunkard” and as “whisky-happy”. Similar accusations were regularly made by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda machine, and have since been made by the revisionist historians John Charmley and Clive Ponting and the former historian David Irving. In a sense, Churchill helped his enemies enormously in this, because of the great number of jokes he made himself about his own drinking, never for a moment considering it something which he needed to apologise for or explain. Stelzer’s explosion of the myth, and her careful estimation of the true level of Churchill’s drinking, is wholly convincing, and will hopefully set the record straight for good. Churchill enjoyed his drink, but had a constitution that could easily take it.
    Stelzer’s discovery and publishing of many never-before-seen photographs of people * and places connected with Churchill and his dinners is another useful contribution to our understanding of the period, the result of her diligent research in private and public archives and her acquaintanceship with so many people – now sadly a dwindling band – who knew and worked with the great man. At breakfasts, luncheons, picnics and dinners Churchill never conformed to the Regency rules regarding the banning of politics as a proper conversational topic over meals. Instead, he would turn mealtimes into information-exchange seminars, international summits, intelligence-gathering operations, gossip-fests , speech-practice sessions and even semi-theatrical performances . It must have been thrilling to have been present.
    The visitors’ book at Chartwell is testament to the wayin which Churchill would invite top experts in their fields to brief him during his “wilderness years” of the 1930s, almost always during mealtimes. His questing mind is just as evident in Stelzer’s wartime and post-war pages. When Churchill travelled – which he did an astonishing amount during the Second World War, despite the obvious and terrifying dangers involved – he defeated the ravages of jet-lag by obeying the dictates of his hunger, and living not on Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time or the date-line time where he was, but instead on what he dubbed his “tummy-time”, eating and sleeping when his stomach told him to. It was part of his special genius that he was able to harness even his intestines to the service of his country, and to ally his own alimentary canal to the cause of victory over barbarism.
    On reading this delightful and fascinating book, we are reminded that an evening dining with Winston Churchill must have been one of the most memorable and enjoyable occasions one could have hoped for, almost whatever mood he was in. (Even the black ones rarely lasted that long.) In recapturing so many of them so acutely, and placing them all in their proper historical context – complete with scores of menus – Cita Stelzer has rendered Churchillian scholarship a signal service. Bon appetit!
     
    Andrew Roberts

    * Photos of Churchill “with food and drink are extremely uncommon” writes Warren F. Kimball, Finest Hour , The Alcohol Quotient, p 31*

D INERS
Dean Acheson
    US Secretary of State, 1949–53. As Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State during the Second World War, Acheson played a key role in framing policies ranging from Lend Lease to plans for the post-war financial order at the Bretton Woods conference. First as Truman’s Under-Secretary and then as his Secretary of State, he proved a forceful advocate of containing the further spread of