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The National Archives, Prime Minister's Office, 10 Downing Street

What’s the Context? Signing the Anglo-American Financial Agreement, 6 December 1945

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: FCDO Historians, Foreign affairs and diplomacy, Foreign Office Historians, What's the context? series

The American Congress and the American people have never accepted any literal principle of equal sacrifice, financial or otherwise, between all the allied participants. Indeed, have we ourselves? Lord Keynes, defending the Agreement in the House of Lords, 18 December …

Reopening the British Embassy following the liberation of Paris

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Foreign affairs and diplomacy, Foreign Office Historians, Second World War
A photo of Alfred Duff and Lady Diana Cooper talking to a VIP.

On 13 September 1944 a Dakota aircraft, with an escort of 45 Spitfires, flew across the English Channel towards Paris. The plane carried the new British Ambassador to France, Alfred ‘Duff’ Cooper, with the mission to re-establish a British presence in the newly liberated French capital.

‘We shall fight on the beaches’: 3 things you never knew about Churchill’s most famous speech

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Foreign affairs and diplomacy, No 10 guest historian series, Prime Ministers and No. 10, Second World War

Ask anyone to name Winston Churchill’s best-known speech and nine times out of ten they will answer: We shall fight them on the beaches. It’s not an exact quotation – Churchill did not include the word ‘them’ – but the …

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