June 2018 - Richard M. Langworth

The escaped desperado: Durban, Natal, 1908.

“A Sun that Never Sets”: Churchill’s Autobiography, “My Early Life”

28 June 2018 Comments 0 Comments

Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission. (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930; New York: Scribners, 1930.) Numerous reprints and editions since, including e-books. Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the full article, click here.

Connoisseur’s Guide

My Early Life appeared a year before the last volume of The World Crisis. The subtitle, “A Roving Commission,” is from the first chapter of Churchill’s Ian Hamilton’s March. It seems he took it from an earlier novel by G.A. Henty, one of his favorite authors. The titles changed places in the first American edition.

A wonderful treat is in store in this most approachable of Churchill’s books. …

Desert Island Books: Charles Krauthammer’s “Things that Matter”

25 June 2018 Comments 0 Comments

Charles Krauthammer’s Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics (388 pages, Crown Forum, 2013). In remembering Dr. Krauthammer, I said this book was one of a score I’d take with me if confined to a desert island. Here’s why.

The reader will ask: why am I plugging to a Churchill audience a set of essays by a political columnist? Answer: because many are not political, yet reflect Churchillian thought. Moreover, Dr. Krauthammer’s essay about Churchill is one of the best summaries of the man I’ve ever read. By anybody. Anywhere.

Significantly, in a book of over nearly ninety columns and essays, the Churchill article ranks second—in Part I (entitled “Personal”)—after a piece on the author’s beloved brother, Marcel, who also died young after an heroic struggle.…

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster”: Charles Krauthammer 1950-2018

22 June 2018 Comments 6 Comments

“CK,” Churchillian

The best editor I ever had wrote: “There is nothing to be said when a friend dies, even among people whose trade is words.” Much nevertheless is being said about Charles Krauthammer. That is fitting, and it is what we have the Internet for. (Some of the most touching tributes are linked below. Fox News produced a very fine tribute, “Krauthammer in His Own Words” click here.)

My editor meant, rather, that for some, words are inadequate against “a big, empty hole where there was once someone you loved. And all the talk in the world won’t change that.…