“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect,” WROTE TOM STOPPARD: “If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
Poland or Russia: Did Churchill Pick the Right Enemy?
With Russia invaded and America still neutral, Churchill was desperate for allies. Decisions had to be made with what was known at the time. It was logical to conclude then that Germany not Russia was the greater expansionist threat. No one could see far ahead, yet no one worked harder than he for Poland’s independence after the war. No one more admired the valiant Poles who fought with the Allies from 1940 to D-Day and beyond.
"Murray's devotion to Churchill was genuine, and I have no doubt that if danger had threatened he would have stood before him. He certainly made the great man’s life easier and the Boss, I think, had a real affection for him. It was Churchill’s inevitable reaction to stand up for any member of his entourage who was under attack. As Lady Churchill once said (looking at me rather pointedly): 'Winston is always ready to be accompanied by those with considerable imperfections.'" —Anthony Montague Browne
"A lot has been made of depression in his character by psychiatrists who were never in the same room with him. He himself talks of his Black Dog, and he did have times of great depression. Some of the things he went through would depress anybody.... Of course, if you have a Black Dog, it lurks somewhere in your nature. But I never saw him disarmed by depression. I'm not talking about the depression of his much later years, because surely that is a sad feature of old age which afflicts a great many people who have led a very active life." —Lady Soames
And so on 6 June 1944 we launched the great crusade, as Eisenhower put it (today perhaps politically incorrectly). Western civilization was saved. Yet it was not, William F. Buckley Jr. argued, “the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster....It is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name….The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy."
From May to November 1915, Churchill held a meaningless sinecure, his only task the appointment of rural judges. “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted,” he wrote, “my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them.… I was forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat.”
It is widely believed that Churchill proposed the expedition to the Dardanelles Straits to bypass the static slaughter in Europe’s trenches. While this is true in the abstract, the plan was not his original vision, nor was it hatched overnight. Churchill and others first contemplated assaulting Germany and Austria-Hungary from the south. Churchill also proposed attacking Germany from the north, even as the Dardanelles operation was being approved by the War Cabinet.
John Churchill (not yet a Duke) "was hidden in the cupboard of Barbara Palmer (not yet a Duchess). After having prowled about the chamber the King, much upset, asked for sweets and liqueurs. His mistress declared that the key of the cupboard was lost. The King replied that he would break down the door.On this she opened the door, and fell on her knees on one side while Churchill, discovered, knelt on the other...."
William Manchester offered two famous Churchill jibes, one original, the other borrowed. David Pitblado reliably confirmed Churchill's famous crack to Clement Attlee in the Gents Loo in the House of Commons. Churchill himself admitted that somebody else first said "The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat."
"There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe.... Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death." —WSC, 1945
Churchill agreed to defer Italian war debt payments until 1930. Mussolini sent “the warmest expressions of gratitude” and offered him a decoration. Er, no, said WSC. (Imagine if that was among Churchill’s medals.) But Churchill's diplomatic boilerplate in Rome has been used to brand him as a fascist. In context, he referred to the Italians, not the British. And you tend to say polite things about a foreign leader when he has promised to pay back a lot of money.
