If I was trying to find a literary illustration for the term ‘curate’s egg’ for someone who’d never heard of the phrase, I could do a lot worse than point them at Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. I’m torn between trying to decide if it is a good book with bad bits or a bad book with good bits. Before I get into the whys and wherefores of those feelings, a bit about the book. As the title suggests this is set during World War II. Our heroine is Maggie Hope, a Brit by birth and Bostonian by upbringing who is settled in London in 1940 after trying and failing to sell her grandmother’s rambling Victorian house in London. After one of Churchill’s secretaries is killed, Maggie is persuaded, against her better judgement, to take on the job and from her position in the corridors of Downing Street and the bunkers of the Cabinet War Rooms she is drawn into the intrigues of the different factions jockeying for power behind the scenes in Churchill’s first months in office....