Hero of the Empire Quotes

“Always more audacity.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Although Churchill had been called many things—opportunist, braggart, blowhard—no one had ever questioned his bravery. “Winston is like a strong wire that, stretched, always springs back. He prospers under attack, enmity and disparagement,” Atkins would later write of him. “He lives on excitement….The more he scents frustration the more he has to fight for; the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph.” Surrounded”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Although Churchill was quick to believe every good thing ever said about his potential, he wasn’t willing to leave anything to chance.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“All Nature smiles, and here at last is a land where white men may rule and prosper." (Churchill on first seeing the southern coast of Africa)”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Well, I devoutly hope Churchill is safe," Atkins wrote in his dispatch that night., hardly believing that the young man who held so much promise could be so quickly lost. "But I half fear the gods love too much a man, only twenty-four years old, who... is that rare combination, the soldier, the reckless soldier even, and the bookman.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,” Pamela would explain years later to Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary, “and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Chance is unceasingly at work in our lives,” Churchill would write years later, thinking back on Grenfell and the fate that might have been his, “but we cannot always see its workings sharply and clearly defined.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“If it was not a good idea, it was at least an interesting one.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“She is certain[ly] very clever, in a doubtful sense of the word.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Jan Smuts, the brilliant young Transvaal state attorney, wrote of Botha that he had a natural sympathy that made it possible for him to “get extremely close to others and to read their minds and divine their characters with marvellous accuracy. It gave him an intuitive power of understanding and appreciating men which was very rare.” Botha”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Long before it was over, the war would also change the empire in another, equally indelible way: It would bring to the attention of a rapt British public a young man named Winston Churchill.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“War had turned out to be far more”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Since the beginning of the war, however, the city had been overwhelmed by refugees, coming in ever-growing waves of increasingly desperate British subjects. In his offices at the British consulate, in the heart of the city, the consul general, Alexander Carnegie Ross, was harried and exhausted, with no idea what to do with them all.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had patented a form of smokeless gunpowder”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“would be fighting in the trenches, it was called a trench coat.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“The British clothier Thomas Burberry had developed a new fabric called gabardine, a chemically processed wool that could repel rain and was resistant to tears. The soldiers in the Boer War would be the first to wear jackets made from this fabric, which they called Burberrys.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“puce”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“British”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Finally, in a desperate attempt to protect its fiercely guarded reputation and stem the potential damage, the Transvaal government claimed that, before Churchill's escape, it had planned to let him go.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“He had no idea where he was, but, he thought with a small twinge of consolation, neither did anyone else.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“Well, I devoutly hope Churchill is safe," Atkins wrote in his dispatch that night, hardly believing that the young man who held so much promise could be so quickly lost. "But I half fear the gods love too much a man, only twenty-four years old, who... is that rare combination, the soldier, the reckless soldier even, and the bookman.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“General Robert Baden-Powell, later founder of the Boy Scouts, drastically cut African rations in an attempt to spare not just his own men but any white civilians trapped in the town with them. His plan was to starve the native population until they were forced to break out of the besieged city in search of food, thus reducing the number of mouths to feed.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults," Pamela would explain years later to Edward Marsh, Churchill's private secretary, "and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“overhead with an eye on the horrid banquet.” In the silence, with the full brunt of”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

“convex side of the train,” he wrote, “when both the”
― Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill