Mr. Lamb's questions, although eliciting information, can be overly general: "What was it like running U.S. foreign policy?" Once in a while they delve into minutiae: "Why did you mention this person in the acknowledgments?" And sometimes the results are comical, as in a famous exchange between Mr. Lamb and Martin Gilbert, the leading biographer of Winston Churchill.
Mr. Gilbert mentioned in passing that when Churchill was a young soldier "he was accused of buggery." Mr. Lamb then evenly asked him to "define it, please." An agitated Mr. Gilbert was nonplussed: "Oh, dear. Well, I -- I'm sorry. I thought the word we -- buggery is what used to be called a -- the -- an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type is how it was actually phrased in the euphemism of the British papers. It's -- you don't know what buggery is?"
