Book, media, audio and video reviews by Richard M. Langworth
Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, by Barbara Leaming. London: Harper Press, 394 pages.
“Great captains must take their chance with the rest. Caesar was assassinated by his dearest friend. Hannibal was cut off by poison. Frederick the Great lingered out years of loneliness in body and soul. Napoleon rotted at St. Helena. Compared with these, Marlborough had a good and fair end to his life.” —Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 1936, Book Two.
A decade on, still a book to readReaders sometimes ask for the best books to read on Churchill’s career after the Second World War.…
Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2021), 608 pages, illus., $35, Kindle $15.99. First published in The American Spectator, 9 November 2021.
“Who’s that man on the horse?”……I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)
Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs.…
I just read William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid. One of the centerpieces recounts the “secret war,” including espionage and covert action, was Ultra/Enigma and Bletchley Park’s activities.
Above all, the book states, Churchill meant to keep the Ultra secret. It claims Churchill knew the Nazis’ plan to carpet-bomb Coventry in November 1940—and did nothing. He says Churchill feared giving away the fact the the British were reading German codes. Have you read this account? I think you found that claim to be false. Was Stephenson the British super-spy his biographer insists he was?…
Review of Parker excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including more images and endnotes, please click here. Subscriptions to this site are free. You will receive regular notices of new posts as published. Just scroll to SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW. Your email address guaranteed to remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
* * *Alistair Parker, ed., Winston Churchill: Studies in Statesmanship. London: Brasseys, 2003, 282 pages, paperback, Amazon $32; hardbound copies also available.
“There are times,” wrote a great Cambridge scholar, Sir Geoffrey Elton, “when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill: whether they can see that no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man.”…
