“The first thing for anyone to know is that THERE IS MORE TO CHURCHILL THAN 1940. Martin Gilbert cited the relevance of his thought, the truthfulness of his assertions, the constructiveness of his proposals, and his remarkable foresight.” —RML
As a sequel to 1960, let’s take 2019. See “Nats Win!”
Until 2019 I was a frustrated fan of the Washington Nationals, as I was the old Washington Senators. As a New York schoolboy in the Fifties, I’d go up to Yankee Stadium to root for the Senators when they were in town. Always wore my navy blue cap with the white block “W.” Big, scary Bronx voices would shout: “Hey, kid—the Washington section’s in the bleachers.”
The Senators were perennial heartbreakers, although in mid-1952 they were only five games out of first place and considered to be pennant contenders.…
"As a long-time bulldog owner (you have met various of my much-loved mutts) I am at once delighted and appalled by what is being proposed. The Kennel Club (if you want an historic parallel, think of the Gestapo or George Orwell's Thought Police) is now demanding changes to what is known as the written standard for some dogs—not just bulldogs, but other breeds too. They will eventually get their way, but it will take decades of selective breeding to produce a series to a “new” standard." —Graham Robson
On Eleuthera, where we spent many winters, there was fascination with U.S. Presidential elections. A virtue of island is that racism, in the sense we all know it, doesn’t really exist. Our easy-going tropical strand features smiles of welcoming locals and friends who have known each other for years. It just doesn’t seem to matter whether the face in front of you is black or white.
So it was perfectly natural for the wife of our local grocer to ask me in 2008: “Is it possible for a non-white to be elected President?”……
Churchill was right when he wrote that this particular “poison gas” is one from which “nearly everyone recovers.” Of 164,612 British mustard gas casualties on the Western front, only 4,086 or 2.5% died. Chlorine in its later "perfected stage" killed nearly 20%.
While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation, including paraphrases and key sections of it, are unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured.
Churchill in 1932 was a lecture specialist. He especially liked Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Ann Arbor: “And who would miss Chattanooga,” he wrote, “lying in its cup between the Blue Ridge and Lookout Mountain?” East, west, north, and south he rode the rails, “living all day on my back in a railway compartment and addressing in the evening large audiences.”
Churchill was in New Orleans on his 1932 lecture tour, between 16 February and 11 March. It was during the last hectic leg of his abbreviated schedule. (In December he was nearly killed by a car in New York and had recuperated in the Bahamas through 22 January.) On 11 March he boarded the Majestic in New York and sailed home. His New Orleans appearance would likely have been around 18-22 February. Or just after the 23rd,
In the 1990s I found and began binding several hundred remaining sheets in leather as well as vellum, but those too are now out of sight. Also, the general editor of the series, the late Fred Woods, edited many of the texts (making changes discussed in detail in the Connoisseur's Guide), which makes them useless as a source of Churchill's original words. The great advantage of the enterprise was the four-volume Collected Essays, the only collection of Churchill’s periodical articles (other than those reprinted in his books) ever published in volume form, with a fine introduction by the late Michael Wolff.
The copyright in Churchill's papers, literary works and papers of which he was the author, did not form part of the 1995 purchase by the British Government, but remains (under the terms of Sir Winston's will) the property of his family, except where it has been separately assigned. No charge is made in the case of reproduction for academic research.
First and foremost, the Daily Telegraph did not connect Obama's grandfather's jailing with the Mau Mau rebellion. The Telegraph report is very careful on this point: "It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather."
