July 2019 - Richard M. Langworth

Read Ian Jack’s thoughtful piece in “The Guardian,” http://bit.ly/2SLDPi5. (Illustration by Matt Kenyon)

Boris, Racism, Imperialism, and “The Road to Mandalay”

29 July 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Prime Ministers are always popular targets. Boris Johnson, Britain’s new PM, wears the bullseye over there now. For everything from domestic squabbling to “insensitivity” in reciting “The Road to Mandalay” on a visit to Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). In the immortal words of Richard Nixon, let us say this about that.

* * * * * “I appointed [Lord Roberts‘s] Commander-in-Chief in India when I was Secretary of State. That was the year I annexed Burma. The place was in utter anarchy. They were just butchering one another. We had to step in, and very soon there was an ordered, civilized Government under the vigilant control of the House of Commons.”…

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Read BBC News for an early report on the new PM’s cabinet at https://bbc.in/2y89KzJ

“The Respectable Tendency” and the New PM, 1940-2019

25 July 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Anent the new PM

My friend Steve Hayward had the wit to paraphrase, in reaction to the arrival of Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, some comments about another incoming PM, eighty years ago next May. “Cambridge Cute,” says another friend of Steve’s good piece.

Speaking of Cambridge Cuties, I immediately thought of what Andrew Roberts described as “The Respectable Tendency,” the British establishment, in his great book, Eminent Churchilllians. So I dug into the sources to find more of what they said back then about the new Prime Minister. (Lightly paraphrased.)

“Coup of the rabble…”

“Even whilst the new PM was still at Buckingham Palace kissing hands, the junior private secretary and Chamberlain’s PPS, Lord Dunglass [Alec Douglas-Home] joined Rab Butler and ‘Chips’ Channon at the Foreign Office.…

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Churchillian Fiction Continues to Roll off the Presses

21 July 2019 Comments 1 Comment

Churchill quotes in the realm of fiction are a well-known feature of the popular culture. So good an aphorist was Churchill that even posthumously, he continues to “manufacture” quote fiction. Sometimes it’s the work of an obscure figure, pinned on Churchill to make it more interesting.

The scholar Manfred Weidhorn has an explanation for what we call Churchillian (or Yogi Berra) Drift: “You do not find yourself the target of Churchillian Drift unless, like Churchill, you are already a fine aphorist. Part of the reason it’s so easy to misattribute brilliant sayings to great aphorists is that they have already coined so many brilliant sayings themselves.”…

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Lectures at Sea (2): Churchill and the Myths of Ireland

14 July 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Churchill and Collins were much alike, William Manchester wrote, “fearless, charismatic, fiercely patriotic, ready to sacrifice everything for principle." Reading Churchill’s book "The Aftermath," the historian Paul Addison pointed out something I hadn't noticed: “The admiration Churchill expresses for the Irish of all kinds.” Ireland excited Churchill’s passion, but mostly in a positive way, for he always respected Irish patriotism and heroism. In the event he proved himself an ally, not an enemy, in Ireland’s quest for peace and freedom.

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Lee surrenders, 9 April 1865. “He was a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, and a victim without murmuring.” (Painting by Thomas Nast, 1895, Wikimedia Commons)

Robert E. Lee and the Fashionable Urge to Hide from History

7 July 2019 Comments 2 Comments

On the tearing down of statues and symbols, Shelby Foote cited a state senator, who got her fellow senators to disallow the use of a Confederate symbol—not the Battle Flag—by the Daughters of the Confederacy. "I don't understand that," he said. "It's a violation of the Greaat Compromise. It's an arousal of bitterness. Now she, along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to. But it seems to me that she's trying to hide history from us—and that's a mistake."

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