Anyway, it was here that Winston Churchill was born, the nephew of the Duke on November 30, 1874, in a premature birth that seemed entirely expected, it has to be said, just eight months after his parents' marriage. Lord Randolph and his rich American mother, Jennie Jerome, were passionate about each other.
Jennie seems to have been simply passionate and after Randoph died went on to have affairs, it is believed, with more than 100 men, each one of them younger as she got older.
But much of Lovell's book is the life and history of Sir Winston Churchill among the governing upper classes of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.
Intermarital sex was everywhere among them, although there is no evidence either Winston or Clementine, his wife, ever strayed. They were devoted. She called him Pug.
Someone once remarked, "This baby looks like you, Winston." To which he replied, "All babies look like me."
But it was holidays in France, Paris, the Riviera. Holidays in Italy. Audiences with the Pope. Christmases at Blenheim, where women were expected to change their dress about three or four times a day, dinners with various Princes of Wales and the glories and brave riding of the hunt. It was a wonderful life for the aristocracy at the great houses set in the bucolic majesty of the great estates.
It's gone now, most of this. World War II saw much of it off, the war that sent England broke and was the end of British might that once ruled half the world. Churchill knew it early on and felt it deeply when Roosevelt and Stalin had a meeting together without him at Tehran.
So I'm reading about this entire other world, this world of beautiful dreams and beautiful houses and estates and balls and good manners that Hitler swept away, and then I've turned on the television and seen all week the ugliness of young British thugs tearing the backside out of half a dozen British cities.
Like everyone, I don't understand it. Why are they doing this, smashing the shops and now each other, destroying the livelihoods of decent people in furious rampages organised by the miracle of the text. Are they so disaffected? Do they not feel they have a stake? Are they so badly educated? Is it racist, all of this? How can you tell, with their balaclavas and hoodies? Young hoodlums lighting massive fires simply to watch buildings burn. I mean, it is so catastrophically un-British. Or is it? They've lived for a long time with soccer hooliganism and lager louts in the UK.
And of course, the kids are so mobile they're very hard to police.
Mind you, who would have thought the British police would have so much riot gear available to them? I doubt anyone could have foreseen how widespread and tinder dry the hostility in the inner cities had become. Maybe the kids are just bored.
It was heartening to see people protecting their temples and their shops. That could be the next thing, race war, but nobody really wants that. That would be a cruel savagery.
No, give me the world of the Churchills any day. I used to write Churchill off as the demon of the Dardenelles. I think now that he unjustifiably wore the sole blame for the Gallipoli disaster. It ruined him politically for years. I hadn't realised that.
Now I admire old Winston very much. He was uncommonly brave and he knew he was a man of destiny. But as he approached 64, he thought his star had passed him by. Suddenly his country called upon him.
His literary output was astounding. He needed the money but he did love to write. His oratory at the start of the war will live forever.
An American general once drafted a speech and asked Churchill to go through it. Churchill gave it a dim report. "What if, instead of 'We shall fight them on the beaches' I had said 'Hostilities will be engaged with our adversary on the coastal perimeter?"'
Yes, I like old Churchill.
And perhaps the old ways were the right ways. Perhaps they should shoot the thugs in the city streets.
