The Quebec conference has left me absolutely cooked. Winston made matters almost impossible, temperamental like a film star, and peevish like a spoilt child. He has an unfortunate trick of picking up some isolated operation and without ever really having looked into it, setting his heart on it. When he once gets into one of those moods he feels everybody is trying to thwart him and to produce difficulties. He becomes then more and more set on the operation brushing everything aside, and when planners prove the operation to be impossible he then appoints new planners in the hope that they will prove that the operation is possible. It is an untold relief to be away from him for a bit.
I wonder whether any historian of the future will ever be able to paint Winston in his true colours. It is a wonderful character - the most marvellous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which if not guided must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again.
The Alanbrooke War Diaries, 30 August 1943.
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