“Film after film, book after book, paints Churchill as a grotesque anachronism. WE NEED TO LOOK DEEPER. Because as he himself once said, “I should think it was hardly possible to state the opposite of the truth with more precision.” —RML
Reader Brent Hinde writes about my Hudson book, The Classic Postwar Years (1977, reprinted 1993). Very kind of him, since it’s the first mention of that book in decades.
Recently at an estate sale I picked up the book and found it an excellent read. On page 38 is a terrific sketch of a car that should have been built, rather than the design management chose. My question is: Who drew that sketch? Are there more drawings like that in existence? It would make a great guide for a project car.
1948 Hudson: dramatic lowness was achieved by sinking the floor within the frame rails.…
(Reviewed for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.) Dunkirk, produced by Christopher Nolan, sets out to portray the 1940 rescue of the Allied armies from the clutches of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in terms of courage, heroism, survival, and a few examples of cowardice. In that he succeeds admirably. In terms of context—in conveying an understanding of what Dunkirk was about—he fails utterly.
The real Dunkirk, 1940.
Drama Sans Meaning
Mr. Nolan says context wasn’t the aim. Dunkirk is about communal togetherness and universal goodness. But that could be shown on any beach in any war in the last hundred years from Gallipoli to Normandy to Inchon.…
“What Price Churchill?” Click here for the final moments of a momentous television epic. “Churchill: The Wilderness Years” (1981) enshrined him forever as the greatest of “Churchills” in a sea of pale imitations. Martin Gilbert‘s close involvement with the scriptwriters gave him truth and substance. In a world of revisionist history, flawed portraits and overplayed roles, it was accurate to a fault. Timothy Robert Hardy was the only actor to play her father for whom Lady Soames would brook no word of criticism. I’ll always remember her greeting him with outstretched arms: “Papa!”
Tim at Hillsdale Tim Hardy at the Dow Center, Hillsdale College, October 2015.…
