“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect,” WROTE TOM STOPPARD: If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
Most popular by far: On both the Hillsdale College Churchill Project website and this one, more reader comment is engendered over Churchill’s role in the 1943 Bengal Famine than any other subject. A lot of it, pro and con, is by Indians themselves. This is understandable. The food shortage that ravaged Bengal in 1943-44 was the greatest humanitarian crisis in India’s history. Up to three million people died—5% of the province’s population. Proportionally, think 16 million Americans.
The book that started the controversy, Churchill’s Secret War, is now eight years old.…
Rather late in the day, I have been reading The Spectator (UK) Christmas Special dated 15/21/29 December 2018. Page 28 refers to one Ronnie Boyd, who had been a teenage Ordinary Seaman aboard HMS Ajax in December 1944, when Winston Churchill arrived in Athens to try to end the ongoing civil war.
“British forces helped put down, with considerable force of arms, a perceived partisan/communist uprising—the so-called Battle of Athens, or the Dekemvriana in Greece,” the article states. There follows the extraordinary statement “Not Winston Churchill’s Finest Hour, it has to be said.” It is accompanied by a mini-cartoon showing WSC on the bridge of HMS Ajax making this announcement.…
There was a time, in a long-ago and innocent age, when national leaders would walk about unaccompanied by security. Sometimes, they would even walk alone.
Four such episodes came to mind last week which exemplify this vanished era. Questions arrived from colleagues about Churchill: his encounters with Canadian soldiers and his North Carolina connections. Then The New York Times published a retrospective on Woodrow Wilson, during the 1918 Paris Peace Conference. This was remindful of a fourth episode, involving Harry Truman. The sadness is that none of these could have happened in, the last fifty years. Maybe longer.…
