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Fine Retriever. At the same time, he has the intelligent man's impatience with much of the clap-trappings of war. "I notice that when we get on both sides of an enemy," he wryly notes, "that enemy is described as 'surrounded,' but when the enemy get on both sides of us, we are told that we have driven a 'wedge' between his two armies." When Hitler invades Norway, "the House is extremely calm and the general line is that Hitler has made a terrible mistake. I feel myself that I wish that we could sometimes commit mistakes of such magnitude."
The best of Nicolson remains his eye for the actors around him. Churchill, he tells the reader, cries often, and has a "strange" habit, when speaking to Parliament, of passing "his hands up and down from groin to tummy." Charles de Gaulle, observed in his London exile, has effeminate hands, lacking muscle and arteries in them, but already in 1941 is heard yelling "France, c'est moi!" at Nicolson in the Savoy Hotel. "His arrogance and fascism annoy me," writes Nicolson, "but there is something like a fine retriever dog about his eyes." Laborite Clement Attlee looks "like a snipe pretending to be an eagle," Anthony Eden is "fairly wobbling with charm," Lord Beveridge, father of the welfare state, looks "like the witch of Endor."
England was ruled—as it still is, though to a lesser extent—by a clubby elite. Nicolson's notes are full of first names and nicknames, and it is sometimes hard to tell whether he is talking about the Beefsteak Club or the House of Commons. Mixed with his uncommon sensitivity to great events there is an uncommon delight in gossip. This does not diminish the worth of the book. If history, as Carlyle said, is really the biographies of great men, it is also their gossip.