2023 - Page 8 of 8 - Richard M. Langworth

Michael Dobbs Churchill Novels

5 January 2023 Comments 2 Comments

Dobbs Churchill novels are of a special genre. Little stories, intertwined with the main plot, tell a story endlessly repeated in Britain, whose citizens knew better than anyone the sheer horror of the Second World War. This is fiction with a sense of place and and character. It does not strain historical credulity. Dobbs gives us an honest picture of Churchill without slapping him with perceived foibles. (Churchill's real foibles are plain enough.)

Churchill, Wells, and Government by “Experts”

1 January 2023 Comments 1 Comment

Churchill shared Wells’s faith in science, but he never lost his reservations about experts. Four months after they met, he declared in Parliament: “It was a principle of our Constitution not to employ experts, whether business men or military men, in the highest affairs of State.” Four decades laster he reiterated: “Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope.”