Notes on The King's Speech by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

statuesque wife Myrtle,

the Crystal Palace, the giant cast-iron and glass building built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, which had been erected in Hyde Park but moved to south-east London after the exhibition ended.

‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’ That close came at 11.55 p.m., scarcely an hour and a half later – hastened along by Dawson, who admitted in medical notes (which were made public only half a century later) to have administered a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine.

the King sitting on his chair running through the speech, with the crown perched on his head. ‘He put it on so that he could find out how far he could bend to the left or right without it falling,’

On 4 June, the final day of the evacuation, Churchill made one of the most memorable speeches of the war – or, indeed, of all time.

In private, Churchill told his junior ministers that Dunkirk was ‘the greatest British military defeat for many centuries’.