Richard M. Langworth

“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

Churchillian Phrases: “Special Relationship” and “Iron Curtain”

4 September 2019 Comments 0 Comments

"Iron Curtain" has been tracked back to Martin Luther in a 1521 essay, “Concerning the Letter and the Spirit.” The relevant passage is as follows: “The letter [law] does not allow anyone to stand before his wrath. The Spirit does not allow anyone to perish before his grace. Oh, this is such an overwhelming affair that one could talk about it endlessly! But the pope and human law have hidden it from us and have put up an iron curtain in front of it."

Read More Read More

Churchill, Leslie Howard, Vivien Leigh and “Gone With the Wind”

31 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

“I am a longtime Gone With the Wind collector and researcher, and give presentations at GWtW events. I’ve also been the GWtW Answer Lady on several websites. Did Churchill and Roosevelt read Gone With the Wind? someone asked.

“It seems that FDR read quite a bit of the novel, but I couldn’t come up with anything about Churchill. I hope you don’t mind me tossing you this question. Maybe you’ve run across a mention of it. I assume that Churchill did see the film, as FDR did, on 26 December 1939, after it opened in Washington. Gone With the Wind opened in London on 18 April 1940.” …

Read More Read More

Garfield, “The Paladin” (or: Christoper Creighton’s Excellent Adventure)

28 August 2019 Comments 3 Comments

The Paladin, by Brian Garfield. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979; London, Macmillan 1980; Book Club Associates 1981, several tarnslations, 350 pages. (Review updated 2019.)

Garfield’s gripping novel: fictional biography?

The late, prolific Brian Garfield wrote this book four decades ago, yet I am still asked about it—and whether it could be true.

The story Mr. Garfield tells seems impossible—fantastic. An eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Creighton leaps a garden wall in Kent one day. He finds himself face to face with the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament. He will later know the great man by the code-name “Tigger.”…

Read More Read More

Present at the Creation: Randolph Churchill and the Official Biography (2)

24 August 2019 Comments 2 Comments

“Randolph Churchill: Present at the Creation,” is taken from a lecture aboard the Regent Seven Seas Explorer on the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise around Britain, 8 June 2019. Continued from Part 1.

Randolph Churchill Postwar

Out of the Army and Parliament in 1945, and divorced from Pamela in 1946, Randolph Churchill led a “rampaging existence,” his sister Mary wrote. “He always had lances to break, and hares to start.” He was loyal and affectionate, but he “would pick an argument with a chair.”

In 1948 he married June Osborne and fathered his second child, Arabella.…

Read More Read More

Fateful Choices, by Ian Kershaw: Japan, Germany, USA (updated 2019)

18 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941, by Ian Kershaw. New York: Penguin, 600 pp., $35. At a time when Churchill’s war leadership is vilified in lopsided paeans to Roosevelt, Sir Ian’s classic World War II study reminds us that FDR wasn’t perfect either.

A recent article suggests that Japan’s decision to surrender in 1945 was by no means unanimous. A few years ago, Sir Ian Kershaw said the same thing about Japan’s decision to go to war in the first place. Long before the war, Winston Churchill mused:

“What a story!…

Read More Read More

Johnson, Trump…can we stop comparing everybody to Churchill?

15 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Politicians, most often Boris Johnson and Donald Trump at the moment, are often compared to Winston Churchill. In a way it’s nice PR for Sir Winston. Half a century since his death, the Greatest Briton still dominates media. His Google hit count is 100 million. (Franklin Roosevelt, the West’s other great war leader, is at 72 million.)

Rightly or wrongly, every day on the Internet, Churchill is praised, lampooned, quoted and misquoted. But comparisons to modern politicians have worn thin. They may emulate him, but should not be compared to him.

Johnson’s Day in the barrel

On 15 June the Wall Street Journal focused on British prime minister in waiting Boris Johnson.…

Read More Read More

Present at the Creation: Randolph Churchill and the Official Biography (1)

8 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

“Randolph Churchill: Present at the Creation,” is taken from a lecture aboard the Regent Seven Seas Explorer on the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise around Britain, 8 June 2019.

Most everybody has an inkling of who Winston Churchill was. But how many know of his son Randolph? How many British schoolchildren do you think have heard of him? Do they know that Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who some think was a real person? They should, Sir Arthur was a great writer. Like Randolph Churchill, who founded the longest biography ever written. In the words of Dean Acheson, he was “present at the creation.”…

Read More Read More

Boris, Racism, Imperialism, and “The Road to Mandalay”

29 July 2019 Comments 1 Comment

If we want to be fair, isn't "The Road to Mandalay" a remarkably progressive 1890 endorsement of interracial harmony? Interpreting it as mere lust after "an exotic object and someone to be 'civilized'" only displays ignorance. Clearly the writer didn't read it well. It contains no expressions of lust, only loneliness. That is what Kipling's soldier is saying. He wants to go back to a land and a girl he loves, and both are Asian.

Read More Read More

“The Respectable Tendency” and the New PM, 1940-2019

25 July 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Anent the new PM

My friend Steve Hayward had the wit to paraphrase, in reaction to the arrival of Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, some comments about another incoming PM, eighty years ago next May. “Cambridge Cute,” says another friend of Steve’s good piece.

Speaking of Cambridge Cuties, I immediately thought of what Andrew Roberts described as “The Respectable Tendency,” the British establishment, in his great book, Eminent Churchilllians. So I dug into the sources to find more of what they said back then about the new Prime Minister. (Lightly paraphrased.)

“Coup of the rabble…”

“Even whilst the new PM was still at Buckingham Palace kissing hands, the junior private secretary and Chamberlain’s PPS, Lord Dunglass [Alec Douglas-Home] joined Rab Butler and ‘Chips’ Channon at the Foreign Office.…

Read More Read More

Churchillian Fiction Continues to Roll off the Presses

21 July 2019 Comments 1 Comment

Churchill quotes in the realm of fiction are a well-known feature of the popular culture. So good an aphorist was Churchill that even posthumously, he continues to “manufacture” quote fiction. Sometimes it’s the work of an obscure figure, pinned on Churchill to make it more interesting.

The scholar Manfred Weidhorn has an explanation for what we call Churchillian (or Yogi Berra) Drift: “You do not find yourself the target of Churchillian Drift unless, like Churchill, you are already a fine aphorist. Part of the reason it’s so easy to misattribute brilliant sayings to great aphorists is that they have already coined so many brilliant sayings themselves.”…

Read More Read More