“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
Sir Winston Churchill spoke about baseball? Yes, that too…
A correspondent and fellow devotee of the game asks if Sir Winston had anything to say about American baseball. Out of fifteen million words over ninety years? Of course he did!
It may seem odd, since baseball is not an English sport, and its closest counterpart over there is rounders. But—ever obedient to the whims of Churchillians—I offer what he had to say on the matter.
The interesting photo above accompanied a nice article, “Churchill on Baseball,” by Christopher Schwarz, which I published a few years ago in Finest Hour 163. I supplied the following Churchill quotes as a sidebar to Mr.…
Though he gave permanent life to blood, toil, tears and sweat, Churchill’s best-remembered words did not originate with him. Similar expressions date very far back. (Excerpted from my essay for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read the full article, click here.)
Quotations scholar Ralph Keyes writes:
Cicero and Livy wrote of “sweat and blood.” A 1611 John Donne poem included the lines “That ‘tis in vaine to dew, or mollifie / It with thy Teares, or Sweat, or Bloud.” More than two centuries later, Byron wrote, “Year after year they voted cent per cent / Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions—why?—for…
"While men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. Under sufficient stress—starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy—the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds...." —WSC
On the first day of April, a spoof flashed around social media. In honor of Easter, all thirty Major League Baseball teams would be wearing jerseys in Easter egg pastel colors. April Fool! The day dawned, and the teams all wore their normal uniforms. The culprit, Chris Creamer of SportsLogos.net, said it was all in fun.
Chris’s joke gained credence thanks to MLB’s habit of commemorating everything from pet dogs to “our troops.” (“Pups in the Park,” who’s gonna clean up that mess?…
… is the most mysterious and ethereal story Winston Churchill ever wrote. Yet the more we know about him, the better we may understand how he came to write it.
Replete with broad-sweep Churchillian narrative, The Dream contains many references to now-obscure people, places and things. The new online version published by Hillsdale provides links to all of them. You need only click on any unfamiliar name or term for links to online references.…
A colleague asks if there were any official tributes by the government of India following Churchill’s death in January 1965. He was curious to know if Indian attitudes half a century ago were as virulent as they are in some quarters today.
There were indeed tributes from India. Heidi Eggerton of the Churchill Archives Centre provided this coverage in The Times of 25 January 1965, page 8, under the heading:
“Leader with Magic Personality”
DELHI, 24 JANUARY 1965— The Indian tricolour flying on all public buildings in preparation for Republic Day on Tuesday, was lowered to half-mast today….…
At a time when Churchill is under violent and irrational attack, it is time for a tonic. One good antidote to it all is an eloquent essay by Simon Schama.
Years ago the Columbia historian reviewed, for The New Republic, Martin Gilbert‘s official biography Volume VI, Finest Hour 1939-1941. It was, incidentally a fine tribute to Sir Martin, whose epic biography Professor Schama christened “The Churchilliad.”
What we should consider right now, though, are Schama’s evergreen words about Churchill. Martin Gilbert’s volume VI reaches its apogee in May 1940—the very time commemorated by the movie Darkest Hour.…
Assault count: Since I am losing track, I thought it would be convenient to create an index to smears of Winston Churchill following the film Darkest Hour. Note the similarity of topics. Many writers feed off each other, repeating the same disproven arguments. Never do they check Churchill quotes or The Churchill Documents —which prove them irretrievably wrong. The order is most recent first.
.
Update for 2019 Assault of 29 March: The Ezine Scroll-in reported that Churchill’s policies caused the drought that caused the Bengal Famine. (Not enough to be Prime Minister, he must also be a farmer, since he needed to know Irrigation.)…
So declare the authors of “Sir John Colville, Churchillian Networks, and the ‘Castlerosse Affair’”—unreservedly repeated by British television, multiple media, even a university: (“Winston Churchill’s affair revealed by forgotten testimony.”)…
Ms. Camilla Long (“TV Review, Sunday Times, March 11th)* has a way with words. Never mind that some of them are so ultra-camp that she could be accused of gratuitously inflicting them on the rest of us proles with malnourished intellects.
“Hoorays,” “lilo,” “naff,” “proto-Wallis” and “pantomime horse-named” may be daily vernacular in the rarified atmosphere of the Sunday Times Culture Section. But they’re likely to confuse anyone who prefers communication to obfuscation. However, the Long View of my colleague Andrew Roberts as a “striped-piglet historian” makes me forgive her everything. I will dine out on that one many times, not least with the Striped Piglet himself.…
