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TLS signed "Yours sincerely, Winston S. Churchill," one page, 7.25 x 9.5, 28 Hyde Park Gate, [London] letterhead, August 22 1950. Letter to Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, in full: "I have of course at once deleted the letter to Hardinge to which you refer in your letter of August 17. I am most profoundly grateful to you for all the help you have given me in my seemingly unending toil. The reconstruction of the SUSPENSE AND STRAIN chapter was a masterpiece. I do not know how you can find the time and energy to help me so much with all the other exacting work you have to do. I am continually oppressed by the sense of the perils which surround us now. I am glad you are in a position where you can do much to ward them off. Old or young, one can only do ones best." Affixed to a same-size backing sheet and in very good condition, with light staining and overall wrinkling from mounting.
Churchill wrote this letter in August 1950 while completing The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of his six-volume war memoir, The Second World War, published that same year. ‘Suspense and Strain’ is a chapter covering the summer of 1942, with focus on the fall of Tobruk to Rommel in June, the vote of no confidence in the Commons that Churchill survived that month, and the simultaneous deterioration of the Allied position in North Africa and the Pacific. It was among the most fraught passages of the memoir to reconstruct, covering a period when the outcome of the war remained genuinely uncertain, and Churchill's own political survival was in question. That Brook had reconstructed rather than merely edited the chapter suggests the original draft was lost or substantially damaged.
Sir Norman Brook (1902–1967) served as Secretary to the Cabinet from 1947 to 1962, the most senior civil service position in Britain, carrying him through the administrations of Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, and Douglas-Home. His editorial work on Churchill's memoirs was conducted alongside those responsibilities — a fact Churchill acknowledges directly in the letter. The Second World War was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.
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