I had completely forgotten – it’s well over thirty years since I read it – that the second volume of Spike Milligan’s war memoirs, Rommel? Gunner Who?, opens like this (thanks to @riversidewings on the Twitter for the reference):
I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry. Thucydides. Peloponnesian War.
I’ve just jazzed mine up a little. Milligan. World War II.
It’s the Jowett translation, interestingly, rather than the more popular and widespread Crawley. I do wonder whether this might be a legacy of Milligan’s school education, but have too much else on to try trawling through biographies; I am also resisting the temptation to work through every episode of The Goon Show looking for echoes of the Melian Dialogue…
For the moment, it’s simply worth noting that Milligan here buys wholeheartedly into the 19th-Century view of Thucydides as the perfectly accurate and objective historian, the model for all proper accounts of past events. Milligan doesn’t repudiate this ideal – and for the most part he just describes what he experienced himself, rather than attempting wider enquiries; but Thucydides also disavowed entertainment as the purpose of his writing, whereas Milligan is more than happy to jazz things up a bit (and one wonders whether, although he doesn’t quote that line on Thucydides, this is evidence that he had indeed read it).
Contemporary references to Thucydides in the context of memoirs and popular accounts – seen most recently in discussions of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury version of the Trump White House – tend to stress instead the issue of making speakers say what was appropriate for them to say, i.e. emphasising questions of reliability and representation (no mention of Thucydides in relation to Bob Woodward’s Fear as yet, but since it isn’t published until next week…). Thucydides as Milligan, in a sense, as somrone who has jazzed things up a bit, albeit for polemical purposes as much as for entertainment…
Sphinx 
I loved reading his War memoirs as a kid – and had also forgotten the Thucydides quote. Spike was a brilliantly bonkers person and whilst not all of the sketches still ‘work’ in the 21st Century, his war diaries are some of the funniest, and most poignant, books. I might just have to dig them out again.
I wanted to get them as a school prize one year – they had quite a neat system whereby you were given credit at the local bookshop, to choose something to be handed at the prizegiving event – and was Firmly Dissuaded and ‘encouraged’ to get a dictionary instead.