“I was, I think, the first in this House to suggest, in November 1949, recognition of the Chinese Communists….I thought that it would be a good thing to have diplomatic representation. But if you recognise anyone it does not necessarily mean that you like him. We all, for instance, recognise the Rt Hon Gentleman, the Member for Ebbw Vale.”* —Winston S. Churchill, 1 July 1952.
On President Obama’s December 17th announcement restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, a colleague writes: “Finally we’ll have access to truly great healthcare.”
Funny. Actually top tier Cuban healthcare is mainly for party members. There is a tiered system.…
Boris Johnson, whose book, The Churchill Factor, is feted widely, speaks his mind with a smile. Like Mr. Obama, he’s a chap I’d like to share a pint with at the local.
But fame and likability don’t a Churchill scholar make. And in that department, Boris Johnson needs some help.
His remarks are quoted from a November 14th speech at the Yale Club in New York City.
Boris Fact-checks1) Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s World War II “loan” of $50 billion worth of war materiel to the Allies, “screwed” the British.
I queried Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers University, editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence and several books on World War II, who wrote:
The U.S.…
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.…
N.B. A shorter version of this piece on Nigel Farage appeared in The Weekly Standard online
A few years ago Britain’s Nigel Farage was a political curiosity, head of a fringe party, gadfly member of the European Parliament, an ex-commodities broker who never went to college, dismissed as a nutter by ruling elites in London and Brussels. On 23 June 2016, he was widely credited with a key role in the referendum favoring Brexit— Britain’s exit from the European Community.
“Our Nige,” his supporters call him—personable, chatty, good-looking, beer swilling, cigarette and cigar smoking—wants Britain, not the European Union, to govern British affairs.…
Writing in the Arizona Republic, Clay Thompson properly corrects a reader. It was not Churchill who coined the phrase, “we shall squeeze Germany until the pips squeak.” Mr. Thompson correctly replied that the author was likely Sir Eric Campbell-Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty in 1917-19. No sooner had Geddes uttered it than the line was ascribed to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It worked well in the 1918 British general election, which Lloyd George handily won.
Lloyd George was personally not revenge-minded. But as a politician he was all too ready to adopt the popular cry “Hang the Kaiser.”…
