Churchill (who despite his large literary earnings throughout his life had been perennially short of money) wanted payment up front, and received £40,000 from Cassells (double what they paid for the History of the English Speaking Peoples which was begun the 1930s but not finished until the 1950s).

However, lucrative deals were also signed for publication by Houghton Mifflin in the United States, serialisation in Life magazine, The New York Times, in Camrose's The Daily Telegraph in the UK and the Murdoch Press in Australia.

He bought Churchill a new poodle to replace Rufus who had been run over at the Conservative Party Conference and persuaded his employer to pay for the first of several "working holidays" in the Mediterranean, at a time when British people were only permitted to take £35 out of the country because of exchange controls.

Kelly wrote that this was "too near the truth to let it go" and that after a furious midnight call from Churchill to the publishers errata slips had to be included explaining that the intended word had been "prop"; he commented that it was reminiscent of the newspaper account of Queen Victoria "pissing over Clifton Suspension Bridge to the cheers of her loyal subjects".

[37] Churchill's comment that "the heroic characteristics of the Polish race must not blind us to their record of folly and ingratitude ... the Poles were glorious in revolt and ruin; squalid and shameful in triumph [over Czechoslovakia in 1938–9]" was given wide publicity by the Communist government in Warsaw as an example of the anti-Polish feelings of British leaders.

I do not believe there is the slightest chance of that in our lifetime" and he argued that the Royal Navy budget should be cut as Japan was the only naval power capable of challenging Britain in Asia and that the reduced expenditure should be used for social programmes.

[75] The first draft of Volume Two included an account of the intense debate within the Cabinet between 26 and 28 May 1940, in which Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax argued that Britain should use Mussolini as an "honest broker" to make peace before France was defeated.

Hastings wrote that the principal difference between the British and French experiences of the war in 1940 was that in France leaders such as Marshal Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, and General Maxime Weygand actually did sign an armistice with Germany.

[87] Churchill wrongly assumed in 1940 that most Americans were Anglophiles who would be so outraged by the German bombing of the British cities that public pressure would force Congress to declare war on Germany before the presidential election due in November of that year.

[103] In October 1949 Pownall and Kelly incorporated comments by the New Zealand War Historian on the Crete campaign and Cunningham the who criticised Churchill's account of the bombardment of Tripoli, but otherwise thought the book "a fair picture of the doings of the Fleet".

[117] Fortunately Luftwaffe aircraft were diverted to the Russian Front in the latter part of 1941 and a force of light cruisers and destroyers was able to be deployed to Malta; Churchill still felt that Cunningham was insufficiently aggressive but by November was distracted by the Operation Crusader battle in the desert.

[123] Churchill did not mention that he followed Eden's advice, which had the opposite effect from the one intended, not the least because Stalin thought that Britain was trying to make peace and took the British warnings about Operation Barbarossa as a part of an Anglo-German plot.

[130] In July 1949 Pownall, who was writing up the North African campaign, wrote to Churchill that the sections on the Battle of El Alamein were largely finished but still needed checking by the Air Historian Denis Richards (later a biographer of Portal).

Churchill had to cancel his writing holiday altogether because the Parliamentary Autumn Recess was postponed because of the outbreak of the Korean War, and a vital manuscript was lost in the transatlantic post, forcing Emery Reves to assemble a staff of twenty for three days around the clock work to make 1,000 changes to a previous draft.

[141] During his time as wartime prime minister, Churchill believed that strategic bombing of German cities might be sufficient to win the war, and as such had devoted immense sums of money to RAF Bomber Command.

[155] On 1 July 1942, Convoy PQ 17 on the highly dangerous "Murmansk run" though the Arctic Ocean to the Soviet city of Archangel had its protection withdrawn by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, following erroneous reports that the German battleship Tirpitz had set sail from her base in the far north of Norway.

[162] Churchill believed the Polish claim that the Soviet NKVD had committed the Katyn massacre of 1940 to be correct, but found the timing of the allegation in April 1943, when the Red Army was doing the bulk of the fighting against the Wehrmacht, to be highly inconvenient.

[162] During the war, Churchill was incensed by the advice from President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he should grant independence to India, which he portrayed in this volume as American meddling in the affairs of the British Empire, or "idealism at other people's expense".

[172] Reflecting his traditional conception of naval war, Churchill devoted entire chapters to the pursuit of the Admiral Graf Spee in 1939 and the sinking of the Bismarck in 1941, but gave less attention to the campaign against the far more dangerous U-boats.

The sea battles usually fought at night between the "wolf packs" of the U-boats against the Royal Navy destroyers that protected the convoys of merchantmen and tankers were crucial for the survival of much of the British population, but Churchill did not seem to find the subject very interesting.

In so doing he both "satisfied dyed in-the-wool Mahanists who spurn[ed] the guerre de course (Mahan had stressed the importance of sea superiority and blockade)" and entertained the public who wanted to read about exciting battles.

[197] Churchill also devoted an entire chapter to the "Islands Lost" as he presented the Dodecanese campaign in September–December 1943 as a great "missed opportunity" that would have allowed the Western Allies to take control of Eastern Europe and thereby prevented the Red Army from advancing west.

[202] Churchill excluded several passages highly critical of General Charles de Gaulle of France and Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia in order not to damage Anglo-French and Anglo-Yugoslav relations.

[206] Churchill did not mention that the British were reading the German codes and were aware of the local truces the Chetniks made, instead crediting the Special Operations Executive mission to Yugoslavia led by William Deakin and Sir Fitzroy Maclean.

[211] On holiday in Venice in August 1951 Churchill, who was rushing to get Volume 5 finished for the US publishers' deadline, was reluctant to deal with queries from Denis Kelly about the Americans wanting to clear up exactly when he had visited the Great Sphinx of Giza with Roosevelt,[212] and to read passages by Lord Cherwell, who Pownall complained wrote inaccurately from memory.

He was granted permission to quote two messages to King George VI but agreed, in the interests of friendly relations, to tone down a comment about the London and Lublin Poles (respectively the representatives in exile of the 1939 Polish government and Stalin's puppet regime), which he did.

[227] On 1 December 1954, the day after his eightieth birthday, his opponent Manny Shinwell attacked him in the House of Commons for having claimed in a speech at Woodford that he had ordered Montgomery to stack captured German arms so that they could be used against the Soviets.

[230] At least part of the reticence concerning the Normandy campaign was to avoid flaming the fires of an Anglo-American historical dispute about the generalship of Bernard Montgomery, the GOCinC of the 21st Army Group, who had clashed a number of times with his commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower who by 1953 was now the President of the United States.

[208] Churchill buried in the endnotes a memo he sent to Eden on 11 July 1944 calling the extermination of the Jews the "greatest crime" ever committed and ordering Bomber Command to bomb the rail-lines to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

[241] On 20 Jan 1957 Emery Reves informed Churchill, no longer Prime Minister, that some proof reading for spelling and punctuation still needed to be done on Volumes 3 and 4 of the History of the English Speaking Peoples but that Mr Wood could do this.