GREAT BRITAIN: Cassandra Returns

Winston Churchill had a busy week. Three days before his 74th birthday, he donned jodhpurs, fortified himself with rum punch and galloped off to the hounds astride a borrowed horse. Churchill's inevitable, square-crowned Russell hat was jammed well down on his head, his equally inevitable cigar clenched firmly between his teeth.

Later, his birthday and the hunt behind him, Churchill stood up on the floor of the House of Commons and, amid grave silence from his colleagues, demanded from Prime Minister Clement Attlee an account of the Labor government's stewardship over the nation's moldering defenses.

"I ask the Prime Minister," Churchill...

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