I am researching events and individuals at the first “summit” between U.S. and British leaders. This was the “Atlantic Conference” at Argentia, Newfoundland on 9-12 August 1941. Most histories focus on the summit meeting, consequently excluding critical meetings between other high ranking individuals. Argentia was certainly also a military meeting. Strategy, tactics and materiel were likewise discussed. Can you help me develop a list of the individuals who involved? Sir John Dill, Admiral Ernest J. King, Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Alexander Cadogan were not there to simply to attend dinners.…
The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has just republished “Scaling Everest,” Robert Hardy’s recollections of playing the Wilderness Years Churchill. They are from 1987, his speech to one of our Churchill Tours, at the Reform Club, London. We are grateful to his executors, Justine Hardy and Neil Nisbet-Robertson for permission to reprint. For Part 1, click here.
I thought the occasion appropriate to republish my original review of the “Wilderness Years” from 1981, some years before we met. I thought at the time I had “laid an egg”—in Churchill’s phraseology, not RH’s.…
The greatest thing about the 2019 Nats is that baseball is again spanning the generations in Washington.
Think about it. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago benefit from six generations of uninterrupted baseball. Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit—the list goes on. Atlanta, Los Angeles and Houston have had half a century or more to build a following: fathers and sons, parents and kids. Alas, Washington was without baseball thirty-four years. In 1971, the expansion Senators left for Texas; in 2005, the Montreal Expos became the Nationals. A beautiful ballpark revived a decrepit area of the city, which now resembles Wrigleyville in Chicago.…
On 10 April 1912, the world’s largest passenger liner set out on her maiden voyage from Southampton, Cherbourg and Queenstown to New York. Four days later, she struck an iceberg and sank in under three hours, killing 1514 people. Titanic has been a bittersweet, fascinating news item ever since.
On 26 October the Daily Mail reported British Channel 5 TV production, “Ten Mistakes that DOOMED the Titanic.” If you saw this, please let me know if one of the mistakes named is Winston Churchill. (See below.) We are always watchful for the onward march of invincible ignorance.…
“God is a Nats Fan” first appeared in The American Spectator on 21 October 2019. Scroll down to the comments for emails with fellow fanatics as the 2019 World Series unfolds.
Yankee Stadium, 1958When Washington was in town, the drill was always the same: 15¢ for a bus to the Staten Island Ferry. A nickel ferry ride and 15¢ more for the BMT to Woodlawn and Jerome Avenues. As the subway erupted into sunlight from the bowels of the Bronx, this kid wearing his navy blue hat with its white “W” would confront the Citadel of Baseball, proud and austere with its eagle logos, bristling with pennants.…
(Updated from 2009). A statement by Churchill on health care has been offered to show that he would support U.S. heath care reforms. My Catholic parish published the aforementioned statement in its weekly bulletin.
“What Would Churchill Do? Here’s an interesting quote. It’s from former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill explaining his view on health care and government in 1948. ‘The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy.…
In the light of recent controversy over the right posture to take over Turkey and the Kurds, this three-year-old post seems as instructive as ever. Updated and republished.
David Goldman, TeacherThe 2016 Hillsdale College Alaska cruise aimed to educate, and so it did. I learned more from David Goldman about Erdoğan, Turkey and the Middle East in an hour than from anything I’ve read over the last five years.
David Goldman, a New York economist, is a columnist for First Things magazine and writes under the name “Spengler” for Asia Times Online. Previously he was the global head of credit strategy for Credit Suisse, and head of fixed income research at Bank of America.…
It is frequently asked: What did Churchill say about those who trade honor for peace having in neither in the end?
“War and Shame”There are two quotations. The first was Churchill in a letter to Lloyd George on 13 August 1938, just before the Munich Conference, which led to World War II a year later.
I think we shall have to choose in the next few weeks between war and shame, and I have very little doubt what the decision will be.
Reference is Churchill by Himself, page 256, quoting Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol.…
“Randolph Churchill: Present at the Creation,” is from a lecture aboard the Regent Seven Seas Explorer on the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise around Britain, 8 June 2019. Concluded from Part 2.
“The Great Work” —Randolph S.C.After the war, Churchill willed his archive to Randolph. In 1959, impressed by his son’s biography of Lord Derby, he invited Randolph to be his biographer. Randolph devoted himself to the job, knowing by then that he had wrecked his body, that the process of disintegration was advanced. Could he finish in time? Randolph wondered.
He housed the archives in a fireproof strong room at Stour, his home in Suffolk.…
