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London Review of Books Christmas Books

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R.W. Johnson

  • The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made by Simon Ball  Buy this book

Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War.

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R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.

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