April 2022 - Richard M. Langworth

Safeguarding the Arts: Churchill Quotes and Misquotes

30 April 2022

"The Arts are essential to any complete national life.... Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due" (Churchill, April 1938). "No, bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them" (Churchill, June 1940).

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Evans — At Harrow School in 1891, Churchill had a vision fifty years ahead. (Bernard Burns, Creative Commons)

Churchill Clairvoyant, 1891: Confidence or Realism?

26 April 2022

It was a summer's evening, Sir Murland Evans recalled, "in one of those dreadful basement rooms in the Head Master's House, a Sunday, to be exact, after chapel evensong. We frankly discussed our futures." What came next was a stunner....

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Collector Car Values: Clunkers and Others—A Sampler

21 April 2022

For 30 years I've written the bimonthly Values Guide for "Collectible Automobile," which for 40 years has consistently turned out quality articles and fine photography on collector cars. I write without a byline, hoping to avoid being denounced by owners who think their car is worth a lot more than the market says it is. But sometimes we make a mistakes....

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Review: Bucknell University’s Panel on “Churchill, Hero or Colonialist?”

15 April 2022

In an age where Churchill is often subject to one-sided discussions by panelists who agree with each other, Bucknell deserves great credit for seeking balance on a fraught subject. Likewise the panelists, Drs. Arnn, McMeekin and Mukerjee, who manage to disagree without rancor, and to acknowledge each other's points of view. The Bucknell program is definitely worth the time of thoughtful readers.

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Fantasies: Trollope’s Brittanula, Churchill’s Battle of Gettysburg

11 April 2022

1930: Kaiser Wilhelm II may today occupy "the most splendid situation in Europe." But "let him not forget that he might well have found himself eating the bitter bread of exile, a dethroned sovereign and a broken man loaded with unutterable reproach...if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg."

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Cover detail from the deluxe edition of “Poy’s Churchill” by Fieldfare, 1954.

Poy (Percy Fearon): The Classic Churchill Cartoonist

5 April 2022

"Caricature was the object of all Poy’s work, but he never dipped his pen in vitriol…. He was not unlike a modern Aesop who…drew the simple truth with devastating clearness. Looking at any of his pictures you laugh because of their very rightness. It is only afterwards that you realise the brilliance of the drawing, and are staggered by the genius that created it."

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