July 2021 - Richard M. Langworth

bed — A Toby lookalike. Pondering his adored pet, Churchill asked: “…how is each feather clever enough to know that it should grow green, yellow or black so precisely according to its position on Toby’s anatomy?” (Photo by Asivechowdhury, Creative Commons)

Did Churchill Conduct Business in Bed? (Or: “Toby’s Roost”)

31 July 2021 Comments 0 Comments

“Business in Bed” is excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including endnotes, please click here. Subscriptions to this site are free. You will receive regular notices of new posts as published. Just fill out SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW (at right). Your email address will remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Q: Did Churchill conduct business in bed?

“I am a criminologist currently researching my next book and I need to know something about Churchill briefing colleagues from his bed. Is this true? Did Churchill work from his bed?…

How Genuine was William Stephenson (Cable Address Intrepid)?

25 July 2021 Comments 0 Comments

Q: A man called Intrepid?

I just read William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid. One of the centerpieces recounts the “secret war,” including espionage and covert action, was Ultra/Enigma and Bletchley Park’s activities.

Above all, the book states, Churchill meant to keep the Ultra secret. It claims Churchill knew the Nazis’ plan to carpet-bomb Coventry in November 1940—and did nothing. He says Churchill feared giving away the fact the the British were reading German codes. Have you read this account? I think you found that claim to be false. Was Stephenson the British super-spy his biographer insists he was?…

Alistair Parker Presents a Balanced, Scholarly Cambridge Seminar

19 July 2021 Comments 0 Comments

Review of Parker excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including more images and endnotes, please click here. Subscriptions to this site are free. You will receive regular notices of new posts as published. Just scroll to SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW. Your email address guaranteed to remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

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Alistair Parker, ed., Winston Churchill: Studies in Statesmanship. London: Brasseys, 2003, 282 pages, paperback, Amazon $32; hardbound copies also available.

“There are times,” wrote a great Cambridge scholar, Sir Geoffrey Elton, “when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill: whether they can see that no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man.”…