I’m giving 93 speeches over the next four months to promote my new book, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, but I don’t actually like public speaking. I enjoy it once it’s over, but not while it’s happening. I envy those writers of the 1970s who just got on with writing the next book as soon as the last one was finished. Once, at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, a lady started her question, ‘You seem to be very ignorant, Dr Roberts.’ The Pensioners naturally roared with laughter. She was referring to my failure to have read the latest issue of a psychology journal that explained Adolf Hitler’s career in terms of his potty-training. More loud laughter from the veterans in scarlet. ‘Madam,’ I replied. ‘You’re correct in thinking that I haven’t read the article… but there must have been other children in Upper Austria in the early 1890s who were potty-trained in similar ways to the putative Führer, who didn’t then go on to start the second world war.’ I’m delighted to say that she bought the book afterwards.
At a book-signing in New York a few years back, a lady asked me to sign two books, one for Mike and another for Peter. ‘Are they friends?’ I asked, trying to make conversation in the way one does when the line starts to shorten. ‘I hope not!’ she replied. ‘Mike’s my husband and Peter’s my lover.’ If only she’d had an even more active love life, I remember thinking, she would have needed to buy more books.
Margaret Thatcher and Lady Antonia Fraser are widely acknowledged in the trade to be the fastest-ever signers of books. It takes ferocious concentration and skilled assistants to sign a thousand in 90 minutes, as I’ve done twice in the past week.
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