Prince Charles never got to ask Churchill for advice on public speaking, but he did get to ask Harold MacMillan for some. The account, on the Churchill Society website is as follows:

The Prince regretted the fact that he had not able to ask [Churchill] about speechmaking – "he was the past master" – noting that "Because I could not ask him I used to sit at the feet of Harold Macmillan, who was another one of those remarkable people". When the young Prince asked the older statesman if he could give him any hints, MacMillan replied that he could only tell him what Lloyd George had told him ("which is quite a good opener"), namely that if you are addressing a huge gathering you have to use gestures, and should never make them from the elbow, always from the shoulder. The Prince then demonstrated the proposed technique, which he had never forgotten, even though he had never been able to put it into practice.

What's more interesting, from my point of view, is the reading list Mamillan supplied the young prince with ...

... drawn from the library at Chatsworth. It started with Gibbon's Decline and Fall which the Prince admitted he had never finished, and included John Buchan's Augustus, which he wholeheartedly recommended. The list demonstrated the scale of classical education – liberal education – in those days, which "enabled them to understand the great sweep of history and the way geography worked".

What books do you think might have been on the list?

And what books do you feel are lacking to round off a person's liberal education today? I ask because these latter are exactly the kinds of books I'm keen on publishing at Liberalis.

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