Lord Moran (1882-1977). Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940-65 (1966)
Part Five. A Long Farewell
Chapter thirty-five. Mournful Gestures
Augusts, 1955
...When we were alone Winston made no attempt to talk. I asked him at last how he was.
‘I suffer,’ he replied slowly, ‘from these pauses. It ... is the state . . . of my mind . . . that troubles me.’
He turned abruptly.
‘Am I going off my head?’
Chapter thirty-six. When Life Was Over
November 18, 1955
...Henry Fairlie has an article on Winston in this week’s Spectator. He wants him to get up in the House of Commons in the course of the debate on Geneva and make another Fulton speech that would change the mind of the nation. I thought it might give a fillip to Winston’s morale. He read the page slowly and then put it down without a word. He knew it was not true. He would make no more speeches that mattered. If he had to get on his legs all he could now hope for was that he would not make a fool of himself.
Chartwell, November 21, 1955
Winston had asked me to call at Chartwell on my way to London. He was reading a section of the book, now in page form. ‘I have 25,000 words to write and then it is done. It might take a year, there is no hurry.’ He smiled. ‘No, there is a hurry. Only my book,’ he went on, ‘commands my ability and my interest. All the rest is drudgery.’
Without a flicker of a smile he added:
‘I find the fifteenth century more interesting than the twentieth. It has more reality.’
December 28, 1955
Winston looked very glum when I appeared today.
‘I’m waiting about for death,’ he said sombrely.
Here was a long pause while he stared in front of him.
‘But it won’t come.’
...I congratulated him on Christopher’s appointment as Undersecretary for Air.
‘Yes, it will be very interesting at this time. England may be indefensible. But I think we may be able to make other countries indefensible. The Government has lost ground in the last six months. I’m glad the Chancellor of the Exchequer has gone. You see me at my best. I’m stupider . . . I. . . well, let me see . . .’
February 13, 1956
...Winston would go to the House on Thursday to vote on hanging.
‘I’m a hanger,’ he went on. ‘It is one of the forms of death of which I have no horror. I never thought about breaking my neck out hunting.’
I marvelled at the number of books in his library that I had not read. Most of them were embellished with Lord Randolph’s bookplate. ‘You inherited them all? This, for example,’ I said, picking out Froude’s History of England in twelve volumes.
‘I bought it,’ Winston answered. ‘I have read every word of it.’
February 18, 1956
...He was full of the hanging debate, and even when Kirkwood had brought his breakfast he kept picking up a newspaper and reading the headlines: ‘Hanging to Go’; ‘By 31st. No more Hanging’; ‘Wild cheers as M.P.s decide.’
‘That’s the Mirror he said grimly. ‘It will do harm,’ he muttered. ‘The Tory Party will be furious, and it will be very unpopular in the country. There will be a murder, and then people will be shocked.’
I drew my chair nearer to the bed. I could not follow his speech.
What troubled Winston was the ‘unmasculinity of the island’.
‘It was mad of the Tories to bring in commercial television. It is no wonder the country is going soft. My interest in politics has come back,’ Winston said, as he fiddled with the papers.
...
из попутного - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Bonham_Carter
Indeed, it was Lady Violet who in her book Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (1965), published in the U.S. as Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait, supplied one of the most famous - and telling - anecdotes about Winston Churchill, one apparently not recorded in her diaries or contemporaneous letters: this recounted how during the course of a deep conversation at the dinner party at which they first met, Churchill concluded a thought with words to the effect that "Of course, we are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm."