“A few curmudgeons have flamboyantly abstained from joining in this birthday greeting; but they are so few that their action merely emphasises the fact that personal respect and friendship habitually survive and transcend political conflict in the Mother of Parliaments. It is particularly appropriate that these all-party tributes on his birthday should be paid to one, the outstanding fact of whose character and career is that he has never been happier than when leading men of all parties and men of no party in some great national cause. He has never ceased to combine zeal for reform with reverence for tradition.…
Churchill by Himself is different from all other Churchill quote books through “correctibility.” It offers a reference to each quotation, and a method by which corrections may be sent in, verified, and made available digitally to readers.
Producing any work as complicated as this is a constant running battle between conflicting sources, experts who disagree with each other, and inexorable deadlines. For instance, one expert offered corrections based on the 1974 Complete Speeches (not complete and scarcely free of errors) that contradict the texts of earlier volumes by Churchill himself—which to me take priority.…
N.B.: If Mr. Olbermann had done more research, he would know what Churchill did say about national healthcare, which is more to the point: see Churchill and Healthcare.
MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.
What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).
In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill
equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies.…
The Great Debate: “Resolved, that Winston Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world.” Sponsored by Intelligence Squared, viewable on C-Span.
LONDON, 3 SEPT 1999— It was avidly awaited but fell flat. Tabling a truly ridiculous motion, Intelligence Squared (“the only institution in town aside from Parliament to provide a forum for debate on the crucial issues of the day”) combined with C-Span to bring us this spectacle. It would have been more interesting to debate whether Hitler or Churchill was the better painter.
I will spare you wisecracks about Intelligence Squared.…
The question frequently arises, was Churchill an alcoholic? Certainly his own accounts of his prowess (“I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me”), and his frequent depiction as a red-nosed drunk by enemies from Goebbels to modernday scoffers, lends one to believe that he drank heavily.
The truth, as Richard Geshke puts it in a communication on ChurchillChat, is that he was “a constant sipper: “I never heard any stories of a drunk Churchill.”
There is just one validated story: Danny Mander, one of WSC’s bodyguards at Teheran, recalls escorting a well-lubricated Churchill and Anthony Eden home after a lengthy series of toasts with the Russians.…
In May 2009, we signed up with Vonage in order to escape the greedy clutches of our local telephone provider, Fair Point Communications, which charges outrageous prices for turning our phones on and off while we are away, and a large premium for “wide area” dialing anywhere outside one sliver of Carroll County, New Hampshire. My advice is: the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
It seemed so easy. Vonage quickly signed us up for $9.95 a month for three months and then only $25 a month for free calls to everywhere but Mars, and sent a $25 modem which they wanted us to plug into our system.…
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Professor Andrew J. Bacevich considered the war in Afghanistan against Churchill’s experience in World War I. Churchill, he says, looked for alternatives to “sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders.” Just so. And we should be looking for alternatives to chewing dust in Afghanistan.
Bacevich describes Churchill’s alternative as “an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles.” (That is a physical impossibility.) Churchill championed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, followed by an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula). Bacevich adds that Churchill wished to “support the infantry with tanks.”…
