Winston Churchill and the German Question in British Foreign Policy, 1918–1922

Book excerpt: It was in the early summer of 1906 that Violet Bonham Carter first met Winston Churchill: an encounter which left an "indelible im pression" upon her. "I found myself," she recalled, sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he remained sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. "And I," he said almost despairingly, "am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though," he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: "Curse ruthless time! Curse our own mortality! How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!" And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment - a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with a new life and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: "We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.