October 12, 2011

LONDON EVENING STANDARD, 7 October 2011—Much mutual congratulation at the Cavalry and Guards Club last night, where Heywood Hill, the Curzon Street bookshop, celebrated its 75th birthday with a party for Lady Soames and Sir Max Hastings.”Mary was with her father at the White House in 1943 and she has met everyone from Lloyd George to Roosevelt and Charlie Chaplin to TE Lawrence,” said Sir Max in praise of Lady Soames’s book about family life with her father Winston Churchill.Then Nicholas Soames MP, speaking on behalf of his mother, acclaimed Hastings for his latest book, his ninth on the Second World War. “I spent two-and-a-half very happy days reading it at the Tory conference,” he announced. So at least something was achieved in Manchester.Sarah Bradford, Sir Alistair Horne, Lord Carrington, Sir Simon Jenkins, the Duke of Devonshire and the Duke of Wellington were there. Sir Max, who is very tall, had difficulty bowing to Princess Alexandra without head-butting her. So he executed a small bend of the knees, which experts said was more like a curtsy.

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