“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
Thoughts on National Churchill Day 2017: TheQuestion.com
Q: TheQuestion tries to provide our readers with the most reliable knowledge from experts in various fields. As we celebrate National Churchill Day, April 9th, we would appreciate your thoughts on three questions. These are currently posted without responses on our website: Was Winston Churchill really that good an artist? What made him a great leader? What was his greatest achievement?
TheQuestion: Churchill as Artist
Please take a virtual tour of Hillsdale College’s recent exhibition of Churchill paintings and artifacts. Here your readers can decide for themselves. The consensus among experts, however, is that Churchill was a gifted amateur.…
Fateful Questions, September 1943-April 1944, nineteenth of the projected twenty-three document volumes, is reviewed by historian Andrew Roberts in Commentary.
The volumes comprise “every important document of any kind that concerns Churchill, and the present volume is 2,752 pages long, representing an average of more than eleven pages per day.” Order your copy from the Hillsdale College Bookstore.
Excerpted from “The Italian Navy in The Churchill Documents, Volume 19,” by Andrew Roberts. To read the full article, click here.
Fateful Questions: September 1943 to April 1944, latest volume in The Churchill Documents, is available from Hillsdale College Bookstore. To order click here.
Andrew Roberts writes:
After the surrender of Italy to the Allies in September 1943, the Italian Fleet was apportioned between the Allied powers and absorbed into their navies. Although the Axis had by then been cleared out of the Mediterranean, the ships played a significant part in the rest of the war.…
Balmy temperatures and a record turnout of 700 marked our event featuring Nigel Farage as keynote speaker at Hillsdale College‘s Churchill Conference and Dinner, held in conjunction with the “The Art of Winston Churchill: An Exhibition at Hillsdale College.” Like most Hillsdale educational events, there were no registration fees or meal charges, all of which are pre-funded. The paintings, organized by the National Churchill Museum, Fulton, were on display from January through March.)
Videos of all presentations are posted. Click here.
Nigel Farage built the UK Independence Party from a fringe group to the point where it dominated UK elections for the European Parliament and was a key force in Britain’s June 2016 vote to leave the European Union.…
Q: Another new movie, A United Kingdom, saddles Churchill with racism. It’s the story of Seretse Khama of the Bechuanaland royal family and heir to the throne. After studying in England, he meets and marries a British woman, Ruth Williams. The South African government, which is adopting Apartheid, is troubled by the interracial marriage. It presses the Attlee government in Britain to exile Khama, which they do. Churchill is not a character in the film, but we are told that he supports Khama and will restore him if Churchill’s party wins the 1951 election.…
Published 8 March 2017 on the Daily Caller, under the title “A Lesson on Russia for Trump.” Their title, not mine; I do not presume to offer anyone lessons.
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” —Winston Churchill, 1939
“If Putin likes Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset, not a liability. Now I don’t know that I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do. But there’s a good chance I won’t.” —Donald Trump, 2017
Russia National Interests
Trump-Churchill comparisons are invidious and silly.…
The longest biography in history takes a long step to completion with publication of The Churchill Documents, Vol. 19, Fateful Questions, September 1943-April 1944. (Order your copy here). Fastidiously compiled by the late Sir Martin Gilbert and edited by Dr. Larry Arnn, these 2700 pages serve up another fresh contribution of documents crucial to our understanding of Churchill in World War II. It is a vast new contribution to Churchill scholarship.
Winston S. Churchill, the official biography consists of eight narrative volumes and now nineteen companion or document volumes, all kept in print and offered at modest prices as both hardback and electronic editions.…
Sir Martin Gilbert’s moving book, The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War, ends with verses from “Willie McBride,” by the Scottish-Australian songwriter Eric Bogle, which carry an evergreen message to all generations, and capture what Churchill thought of modern war—which he tried so hard, before both World Wars, to avoid.
Sir Martin wrote that in research for the book, he and Lady Gilbert found the grave of Private William McBride, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, killed April 1916, two months before the Somme. Whether this was the grave of Eric Bogle’s subject is immaterial.…
A colleague asks if it’s true that Churchill comrade Jack Seely was “arrested for arrogance” in the Boer War! It doesn’t sound to either of us like an arrestable offense, but fits the character—a lordly aristocrat-adventurer, and thus almost inevitable Friend of Winston.
A Churchill biographer, Esme Wingfield-Stratford, agreed: “Gallant Jack Seely, from the Isle of Wight…a light-hearted gambler with death, was about the one man who could claim a record to compare with that of Winston himself.”
C.N Trueman thinks that Jack Seely could not have lived in the 21st century. “He truly belonged to an era associated with the British Empire and the attitudes embedded into a society that at one point had a government that controlled a quarter of the world.”…
Was the war really avoidable? Yes, it was—at Munich in particular—but with great difficulty. No one can underestimate the problems in the way. And yet, tantalizing opportunities existed. "Appeasement" is not in "Churchill and the Avoidable War." It is far over-used, and broadly misunderstood. It is not popular, Churchill wrote, "but appeasement has its place in all policy." There are lessons in Churchill's Avoidable War that serve us well today. Will we listen? We rarely have.
