Year: 2012

The Lion is Back

The Lion is Back

“Then out spake brave Hor­atius, the Cap­tain of the Gate.” William Manchester’s inscrip­tion, quot­ing Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, a Churchill favorite, on my sec­ond vol­ume of his Last Lion, reminds me that Bill was him­self for many of us “Cap­tain of the Gate”; and that his death in 2004 bid fair to deprive us of finale of the most lyri­cal Churchill work ever written.

Not quite. Twen­ty-four years on, Lit­tle Brown has pub­lished the third and final vol­ume of this famous biog­ra­phy, sub­ti­tled Defend­er of the Realm 1940-1965 (1232 pages, in hard­bound, Kin­dle and audio editions).…

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“Remember the past”: Santayana, but never Churchill

“Remember the past”: Santayana, but never Churchill

I am a librar­i­an and I have a patron who inquired about famous quote by George San­tayana (in The Life of Rea­son, 1905): “Those who can­not remem­ber the past are con­demned to repeat it.” We know the quote was orig­i­nal­ly Santayana’s, but our patron would like to know when Mr. Churchill first used it. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, my col­league and I have not been able to locate the the time or con­text of quote as it relates to Mr. Churchill. —D.J., New York

I searched Churchill’s 15 mil­lion pub­lished words (books, arti­cles, speech­es, pri­vate papers) but could find no occur­rence of Santayana’s remark.…

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Churchill & the Bombing of Coventry

Churchill & the Bombing of Coventry

The Wei­der His­to­ry Group replied to a query. “Did Churchill allow Coven­try to be burned to pro­tect his secret intel­li­gence?” Their answer was some­what equivocal:

There cer­tain­ly have been a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent accounts, even sup­pos­ed­ly by eye­wit­ness­es, that con­tra­dict each oth­er as to how much Win­ston Churchill had learned from the Boni­face (lat­er Ultra) decoders as to the main tar­get for the Ger­man “Moon­light Sonata” air raid on the Mid­lands in Novem­ber 1940, and when did he ascer­tain it. Whether he mis­took it for a feint, with Lon­don the actu­al tar­get, of whether he knew of Coven­try and left it to its fate rather than com­pro­mise Britain’s abil­i­ty to crack the Ger­man Enig­ma codes seems to depend on one’s feel­ings toward Churchill.……

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