“Churchillian” humour

The write up by Syed Badrul Ahsan ( Book review 15.12.07) is immensely enjoyable. However, I would like to add a couple of incidents for further sharing by your readers . Once Churchill (much perturbed due to his war office efforts) went for a haircut in a nearby barber's shop. The barber in his jovial manner asked him, "How would you like your haircut, Sir?". "In silence please", was the curt reply.
Churchill's comments about civil servants no longer being "servants" nor "civil" have echoes of similar comments about "Indian civil servants" or ICS officers of the day by many other famous personages, with the addition of "not Indian". If true of Churchill it must have come from him at a much later time nearer the end of his career, because I as an ex British Civil Servant have kept and cherished an article By Churchill printed in the Times on February 25, 1922 where the profusely admired the poise and tone of the civil servants as his experience of them showed over 16 years of running various public departments of state. Churchill said, " Powerful, incorruptible, anonymous, the civil service discharged a function in this country which was invaluable, and without which immediate disaster would overtake any administration which attempted to carry on the business of state".
Churchill did not like at the time the cheap vulgar clamour and chatter with which civil servants were assailed. He concluded, “Parliament lived from one election to another, governments did their best to get through the session, politicians looked a month ahead, and journalists lived from one edition to another, from one headline to another. In all this quick-moving life, what a vital thing it was to have some instrument which was thinking not in days or in months or in parliaments but was thinking of the affairs of the British Empire in terms of a whole lifetime.”