Laguna Hills, Calif., October 6th— Curt Zoller, a Churchill scholar for a third of a century, passed away a week short of his 94th birthday. “Over the last two years his health had been rapidly declining,” writes his daughter Marsha, “but he tried so hard to ‘Never give in.'”
A serious book collector, Curt was a longtime columnist for Finest Hour, the Churchill quarterly I edited from 1982 to 2014. There he wrote “Churchilltrivia,” the Quiz column. In 2004 he published an invaluable reference, The Annotated Bibliography of Works About Sir Winston S. Churchill. In it, Curt logged thousands of books, articles and dissertations.…
Part 3: Pleasing No One …continued from Part 2
Churchill was correct when he said his writings about Hitler satisfied neither Hitler’s defenders nor Hitler’s critics. One of the former was Lord Londonderry, a pro-Hitler peer who complained that Churchill’s Evening Standard piece would prevent a decent understanding with Germany. On 23 October 1937, Churchill replied to Lord Londonderry (Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 581):
You cannot expect English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerances of Nazidom, though these may fade with time. On the other hand, we all wish to live on friendly terms with Germany.…
Part 2: “Friendship with Germany” ,,,continued from Part 1
Churchill’s critics sometimes quote sentences which they think came from his original Hitler article or Great Contemporaries, among which this is the most common:
One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.
In fact this passage is from Churchill’s article in the Evening Standard, 17 September 1937: “Friendship with Germany” (Cohen C548), subsequently reprinted in Churchill’s book of foreign affairs essays, Step by Step (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939, Cohen A111).…
Part 1: “Government by Dictators”
The Hitler chapter in Churchill’s book Great Contemporaries, like the rest of the volume, was derived from a previous article. In this case the original was “The Truth about Hitler,” in The Strand Magazine of November 1935 (Cohen C481). Ronald Cohen notes in his Bibliography that Strand editor Reeves Shaw, who paid WSC £250 for the article, wanted Churchill to make it “as outspoken as you possibly can…absolutely frank in your judgment of [Hitler’s] methods.” It was.
Two years later, when Churchill was preparing his Hitler essay for Great Contemporaries, he characteristically submitted it to the Foreign Office, which asked that he tone it down.…
Although he had some very religious friends, like Lord Hugh Cecil, Winston Churchill was not a religious man. Introduced to religious diversity early, he was brought up “High Church,” but had a nanny “who enjoyed a very Low Church form of piety.” When in rebellious mood he would tell Nanny Everest “the worst thing that he could think of…that he would go out and ‘worship idols.’”
After his self-education as a young officer in India, when he read all the popular challenges to orthodox religion, like Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, Churchill evolved into what we might term an “optimistic agnostic.” He…
The diaries of Churchill’s youngest and only living daughter, Mary Soames, are to be published on her 89th birthday, September 15th, by Doubleday UK, and is available for shipment worldwide from Amazon UK. An e-book will also be available. American publication will be in May 2012 by Random House in New York. The Amazon UK price is £16.50 ($26.50) and airmail shipment to the USA costs about £7 ($11).
Much younger than her siblings, Mary had an idyllic youth, growing up at Chartwell, her father’s beloved Kentish home, but always in the background was his preoccupation with the growing threat of Hitler, and in 1939 the war arrived, and with it Mary’s life was dramatically altered.…
The signature on a fantastic autographed photo of Winston Churchill at Chartwell, which a friend framed and kept on his wall and hid from the light, has faded to nothingness. Even ambient room light will fade ancient inks, and there is nothing to be done.
Back when I was senior editor at Automobile Quarterly, I rescued a wonderful big 3×2-foot photo of the great Grand Prix champion René Dreyfus (the world’s last great Frenchman), and his Type 35 Bugatti, from the dustbin and brought it over to Le Chanteclair, his wonderful French restaurant on 49th Street, Manhattan, for him to inscribe to me.…
