Diana Preston > Quotes

“Mike Reilly had noted, while making security checks on peasant huts near the Livadia, that ‘every house, no matter how poverty-ridden, had a radio . . . They were odd-looking radios to these American eyes, as they had no knobs or dialling apparatus of any kind. It seemed that they were built to receive only one frequency, which was that of the powerful Moscow government-controlled station.”
― Diana Preston, Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Shaped the Post-war World

“Churchill was so overweight that in 1942 he had to have a new desk installed in his Cabinet war rooms beneath London’s Whitehall because he could not fit behind the previous one.”
― Diana Preston, Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Shaped the Post-war World

“His inaugural address was the briefest in US history – less than 600 words – and his message simple: the people of America were ‘passing through a period of supreme test’ during which they had learned ‘to live as men and not as ostriches’ and to be ‘citizens of the world’. He promised that, ‘In the days and the years that are to come, we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war.”
― Diana Preston, Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Shaped the Post-war World