2024 - Page 3 of 7 - Richard M. Langworth

Re-Rat Awards 2009 to Senators Gregg Arlen Specter

15 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” He was prescient. Re-Ratting is a lost art.

Read More Read More

Winston Churchill as Motorist: Always in a Hurry

11 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Habitually late, Churchill would typically “pile into the Humber around 5:30 for a 7:00 speech a hundred miles distant. As his chauffeur swings into the high road, Churchill crouches, with a flask, on the edge of the back seat and urges him to greater speeds. Once, doing 80 on a curve, a rear tyre blew and “a van full of irate constables screeched to a halt alongside. They had been trying to catch the runaway for miles.” Realizing who it was, they helped fix the tyre. “Churchill made no sign of apology but cried, ‘Drive off!’ The constables saluted humbly.”

Read More Read More

Speaker Jitters: Churchill Had Them, Necessitating Strategy

5 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Unlike modern newscasters and some politicians, Churchill saw no reason to patronize foreigners by overemphasizing their pronunciation. In fact, he worked very hard to anglicize words that particularly annoyed him. Britons, he said, should stand forthrightly behind Anglicized nomenclature: "If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris 'Paree.' Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names. I date this minute from St. George’s Day." Churchill as speaker was devoid of faddish jargon. (Imagine what he would make of vernacular like “reaching out” (for “contacting”) or “issues” (“for problems”).

Read More Read More

Literary Queries: Churchill Signatures and Inscriptions

30 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Is the signature genuine? Yes, it seems so. From your photo it looks suitably aged and seems to have been there a long time. Inscribed books or photographs with the signatures pasted in or added to the matte are sometimes encountered. They are not, of course, as valuable as books the author personally inscribed, particularly if he named the recipient (such as the example above).

Read More Read More

Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took As Good As He Gave

25 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Not all were pleasant ribbing: “The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.... [His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book…while dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms.” —Nye Bevan

Read More Read More

Churchillisms: Puddings Without a Theme

20 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

"[We are] passing through a period of eclipse which may well be converted into a period of decline. There is anxiety abroad, and can we wonder at it! Why should the Government complain? Look at all they have said. Look at all they protest they stand for…. They have no theme [and] have deluded the masses of their supporters in the country into believing they are about to bring into being some vast, splendid, new world." —WSC

Read More Read More

“Jennie” with Lee Remick is Viewable on YouTube

15 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Viewable all seven episodes on YouTube, "Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill" (1974) remains one of finest Churchill films, honest to history with vivid portraits of the Edwardian Churchills. Its lasting fame was largely owed to Lee Remick, whose portrayal of Lady Randolph was simply unimpeachable. As Gregory Peck said at our tribute: "Playing opposite this clear-eyed Yankee girl with the appealing style and femininity that graces every one of her roles just simply brings out the best in a man."

Read More Read More

Churchill and the Red Scare: The Zinoviev Letter

10 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

The conspiracy theorists have not got round to accusing Churchill of actually writing the Zinoviev Letter–at least as far we know! It is virtually certain that he was not involved in the forgery, though he initially accepted it as genuine. He did take political advantage of the Zinoviev uproar. Even if it were forged, he said, it was nothing new where Bolsheviks were concerned. He called Ramsay MacDonald a “futile Kerensky.”

Read More Read More

Cita Stelzer on the Anglo-American Special Relationship

5 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Cita Stelzer notes that Churchill’s outgoing character, his fraternal love of his mother’s land, soon disabused his hosts of base impressions. The Anglophile journalist Frederick Wile was not the first American to go out on a limb (albeit with a nickname WSC detested): “Dynamic, brilliant, resourceful and lion-hearted, ‘Winnie’s’ path, his admirers are persuaded, one day will lead him to the premiership” (110). It would—but not quite in the way Wile expected.

Read More Read More

Coming: New Churchill Phrase Index in My Next Quotebook

30 June 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Coming from Hillsdale College Press, the new edition will carry a brand new title in keeping with its far larger content. Earlier editions contained 3500 quotations; they now total over 5000. Many new ones derive from The Churchill Documents, 1942 to 1965, also published by Hillsdale. The preliminary proofs total 736 pages, but that's without the indexes. These are being compiled by the award-winning lecturer Do Mi Stauber.

Read More Read More