Winston Churchill once pilloried one of prime minister Stanley Baldwin's policies in the House of Commons. "History will say that the right honorable gentleman was wrong in this matter," Churchill bluntly declared. "I know it will, because I shall write the history."

[Churchill later won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1953) in large part for his masterful multi-volume history of the second world war.]

[Shortly after Harold Macmillan was chosen as the new Conservative leader (over Rab Butler), a private secretary entered Churchill's office and found him muttering: "Intelligent, yes. Good-looking, yes. Well-meaning, yes, but not the stuff of which prime ministers are made." "But would Rab have been any better?" the secretary interjected. "I was thinking," Churchill replied, "of Melbourne." (Churchill often spoke of such historical figures as Walter Raleigh and Henry VIII as though they were his contemporaries; Lord Melbourne had died in 1848.)]