A website named “IL Conservative” posted in June 2009 eight Churchill “quotations,” six of which he never said. These quotations are all over the Internet, none of them attributed to WSC. They just seem to multiply and get passed on, like the common cold. They are all examples of “Churchillian Drift” (or “Yogi Berra Drift,” if you are a baseball fan): neat little sayings attached to somebody famous to make them sound more interesting.
The purpose of my “Red Herrings” appendix of eighty incorrect quotations in Churchill by Himself is to counteract the raft of misinformation conveyed, largely through the web, but it’s like the Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dyke.…
Into the Storm, a television drama broadcast by the BBC and HBO. Produced by Ridley Scott, directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan. Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill and Janet McTeer as Clementine Churchill. Screenplay by Hugh Whitemore.
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods…”
—“Horatius,” stanza XXVII in Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Babbington Macaulay. Recited at the beginning and at the end of “Into the Storm.”…
As a sequel to 1960, let’s take 2019. See “Nats Win!”
Until 2019 I was a frustrated fan of the Washington Nationals, as I was the old Washington Senators. As a New York schoolboy in the Fifties, I’d go up to Yankee Stadium to root for the Senators when they were in town. Always wore my navy blue cap with the white block “W.” Big, scary Bronx voices would shout: “Hey, kid—the Washington section’s in the bleachers.”
The Senators were perennial heartbreakers, although in mid-1952 they were only five games out of first place and considered to be pennant contenders.…
On Eleuthera, where we spent many winters, there was fascination with U.S. Presidential elections. A virtue of island is that racism, in the sense we all know it, doesn’t really exist. Our easy-going tropical strand features smiles of welcoming locals and friends who have known each other for years. It just doesn’t seem to matter whether the face in front of you is black or white.
So it was perfectly natural for the wife of our local grocer to ask me in 2008: “Is it possible for a non-white to be elected President?”……
