Visiting London in 1918 as American Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt met the young Winston Churchill for the first time. Roosevelt"s reported comments on Churchill did not bode well for the future. According to Roosevelt, "He acted like a stinker." However, over 20 years later, Roosevelt and Churchill were to find themselves forging one of the most crucial alliances in military and political history in the face of the Axis forces of Nazi Germany and Japan. The story of their remarkable political alliance and personal friendship is vividly recounted in David Stafford"s Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets, which charts the intense relationship between the two men, from Churchill"s elevation to Prime Minister in 1940 to Roosevelt"s death in April 1945. The story of the development of the abiding "Special Relationship" established between the US and the UK by the two men has often been told, but Stafford intelligently reveals the personal dimensions of both men--Roosevelt the democratic, modernising anti- colonialist, Churchill the conservative, traditional imperialist--insisting that they both "knew the political value of the personal touch." In the process he carefully paints a picture of a relationship which ultimately defeated Hitler: "Seventeen hundred messages passed between them, and in nine meetings and several conferences they had spent a hundred and twenty days of close personal contact together." In the process Stafford revisits the manoeuvrings prior to Pearl Harbour which brought the US into the war, as well as fascinating new information on both men"s obsession with clandestine military intelligence, and the various forms of political and diplomatic skullduggery which they shared in their ultimate pursuit of a new world order. Stafford concludes that "this was a rich and complex partnership that survived the greatest and most terrible conflict in history. To win it, they were willing to trust each other with their closest secrets while remaining firmly attached to their distinct national interests", a situation from which the current "Special Relationship" could still learn a great deal. --Jerry Brotton