… so I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still found myself stopping at a line from a review of Candice Millard’s account of Winston Churchill’s time in the Boer War:
For Millard, Churchill (whose mother was American) is not an embodiment of the British bulldog breed. Rather, he is one of those ambitious men – boiling over with surplus energy and devoted to a toxic ideal of honourable manliness – who abounded on both sides of the Atlantic at the beginning of the 20th century.
(Italics mine — Prof. M.) Kind of came in handy in the early 40s, though, dinnit? (And of course, I also love the reminder of his “half-breed status.” Let’s hear it for hybrid vigor.)
Professor Mondo 
You got me curious. Looking through other reviews of the book, it seems pretty clear to me that “toxic” is Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s characterization and not Candice Millard’s. It’s a very poorly written sentence on Hughes-Hallett’s part since she seems to attribute that attitude to Millard.