“Among his many qualities over fifty years of political prominence was CHURCHILL’S CONSISTENCY. He might not agree with every position, biographer Martin Gilbert wrote: ‘But there would be nothing to cause me to think: How shocking, how appalling.’” —RML
Cole Porter and a Vanished Culture: Brewster and Mussolini
"You're the top! You're a Ritz hot toddy. You 're the top! You're a Brewster body. You're the boats that glide on the sleepy Zuider Zee, You 're a Nathan Panning, You're Bishop Manning, You're broccoli!" Brewster and Company lasted 127 years, felled by the Great Depression in 1937. They were, as Cole Porter said, the top of the line. The finest craftsmanship combined with the best materials. A Brewster body meant the owner had arrived. If you were really loaded you'd order two Brewster bodies for your Packard or Rolls-Royce chassis: a classy open number for the summer, a snug town car or limousine for the winter.
The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy....It is my proposal that Churchill’s words were indispensable to the benediction of that hour...." —Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.
Britain has left the European Union. “It was a transcendental night,” Andrew Roberts writes of January 31st. Read his excellent piece on Brexit and the UK’s regained sovereignty in the Daily Telegraph: “Britain has become an adult once again, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions. [It] has boldly stepped out on its own, taking a risk, certainly. But then which great historic national action has not involved some element of risk?…
By stating that no foreign law shall henceforth have jurisdiction over British law, we have thrown away the jurisprudence comfort blanket and become an adult, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions again….…
The English-Speaking Union posed a question which illustrates the problem of secondhand quotes. That is, something Churchill said which is not in his published canon. The quote is: “If you can speak in this country [Britain], you can do anything.” It was a concise celebration of the British right to free speech. The ESU has it on their website. But is it verifiable?
In 1966, the ESU Philadelphia Branch hosted an exhibit of my Churchill biographical stamp collection at the Philadelphia National Bank. It was the first public appearance of whatever limited Churchill knowledge I then had, my “awakening” as a Churchillian.…
29 October 1994
A fond and funny memory of Paul Addison is one which few know about. It came during a Washington symposium on “Churchill as Peacemaker,” later published as an outstanding book. During a break, we walked over to the White House, which Paul wanted to see. We stood at the iron fence, gazing at the seat of power across the lawn.
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As we chatted, Paul remarked on how close we were to the building itself. “The security seems pretty light,” he said. “It’s not hard to visualize some stray lunatic standing here and spraying the walls with bullets.”…
Digital scans of 80 million words by and about Churchill, including his books, articles, speeches and published papers, offer no instance of this phrase, either with the word “slaughtered” or the word “butchered.” Neither did I find any statement of his suggesting Britain had “fought the wrong enemy.” One of Churchill's virtues was to recognize the main threat to peace at each juncture in his career. From 1933 to 1945, he was certain that Nazi Germany was not the "wrong pig." He did begin to think, late in the war, that one mortal foe had given rise to another. But he always kept things in perspective.
Admirers of Sir Martin Gilbert were pleased and touched to see his chronicle appear, now over twenty years ago. But few expected it would amount to much more than a useful research tool. We were wrong, and quickly realized why Sir Martin and Wendy Reves were so keen to get it published.…
Marcus Peters (Adé Dee Haastrup) is a neatly dressed West Indian riding the London Underground on 28 May 1940. Whom should he meet but Prime Minister Churchill (Gary Oldman)! The scene (fiction) forms a dramatic moment in Darkest Hour, Joe Wright’s great film on Churchill in 1940.
Churchill, per the movie, has entered the Underground for the second time in his life. (The first was in the 1920s, when he couldn’t find his way out and had to be rescued.) He goes there as the Germans are rolling up Europe.…
The Fleming myth is updated from an article originally published in 1998.
Is it true that Lord Randolph Churchill financed the education of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, as a result of Fleming (or his father) rescuing Churchill from drowning in a swamp when young Winston was a youth—and a Fleming discovery, penicillin, saved Churchill’s life years later in 1943? A friend of mine has sent me this email regarding it and I wanted to verify . —L.M.
This question comes up regularly, but both parts of the story are untrue. Neither Alexander Fleming nor his father were with Churchill at the times suggested.…
“A Century Ago, the Modern Middle East Was Born,” announced The New York Times in December. A colleague asks: “Are you not struck by how difficult (impossible?) it is to encapsulate history in an op-ed? Is that really how and when the modern Middle East was born?”
Good questions. The Times’s idea is that after World War I, avaricious imperialists moved in to enslave Turkey’s former slaves. This familiar theme will dominate through the centenary of the Cairo Conference in March 2021. It’s been around at least since 2001, when Osama bin Laden referred to 9/11 as payback for what he then called “eighty years of injustice.”…
