“Above all, Sir Winston carried about him a certain JOYOUS HUMANITY. Asked what he most admired about him, Marshal Tito, a most perceptive man, said:
‘His humanity. He is so human.’ On that at least I agree with Marshal Tito.” —RML
Don Vorderman 1930-2018: The Best Editor I Ever Had
A remembrance first published in The Automobile, December 2019. This version contains two additional illustrations and a glossary of Vorderman bon mots on automobiles.
“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.” —Winston S. Churchill, 12 November 1940
“Writers rarely talk about writing among each other. It’s a very personal thing, and it’s almost always hard to do well, none of which is too conducive to cheery cocktail chitchat. Most of us would rather visit a dentist than face up to the task of beginning the next piece, though it’s not quite so awful once the commitment is made and the thing is under way.”
My dear friend Don Vorderman wrote that about the English motoring writer Dennis May, but he was also describing himself.…
I am researching events and individuals at the first “summit” between U.S. and British leaders. This was the “Atlantic Conference” at Argentia, Newfoundland on 9-12 August 1941. Most histories focus on the summit meeting, consequently excluding critical meetings between other high ranking individuals. Argentia was certainly also a military meeting. Strategy, tactics and materiel were likewise discussed. Can you help me develop a list of the individuals who involved? Sir John Dill, Admiral Ernest J. King,Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Alexander Cadogan were not there to simply to attend dinners.…
The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has just republished “Scaling Everest,” Robert Hardy’s recollections of playing the Wilderness Years Churchill. They are from 1987, his speech to one of our Churchill Tours, at the Reform Club, London. We are grateful to his executors, Justine Hardy and Neil Nisbet-Robertson for permission to reprint. For Part 1, click here.
I thought the occasion appropriate to republish my original review of the “Wilderness Years” from 1981, some years before we met. I thought at the time I had “laid an egg”—in Churchill’s phraseology, not RH’s.…
