Journalist Leo McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee is a deft analysis of a political odd couple who led Britain’s Second World War coalition government. Now, eighty years since the death of Neville Chamberlain, he has published an excellent appraisal in The Spectator. Churchill’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Chamberlain negotiated the 1938 Munich agreement. “Peace for our time,” he famously referred to it. In the end, he bought the world peace for a time.
Mr. McKinstry is right to regret that Chamberlain has been roughly handled by history. “The reality is that in the late 1930s Chamberlain’s approach was a rational one,” he writes.…
This history of the Official Biography was first published in Finest Hour 190, Fourth Quarter 2020
“We go back a long way,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn recently reminded me. “I knew Dal Newfield.” He realized that would invoke a fond memory. A few still remember the man responsible for where some of us are today.
Dalton Newfield was a Sacramento army veteran who had admired Winston Churchill since he saw him live during World War II. In 1970, I shrank away from Finest Hour after the first eleven issues. I was clearing the decks for an automotive writing career in New York City.…
Excerpted from an article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, September 2020. For the complete text, an appendix of Churchill’s words on Armenia, more illustrations and endnotes, please click here.
The age-long misfortunes of the Armenian race have arisen mainly from the physical structure of their home. Upon the lofty tableland of Armenia, stretching across the base of the Asia Minor Peninsula, are imposed a series of mountain ranges having a general direction east and west. The valleys between these mountains have from time immemorial been the pathways of every invasion or counter-attack between Asia Minor in the west and Persia and Central Asia in the east….…
The Greeks are still not laughing about their mid-1940s civil war, so levity may be inappropriate. Nor was at the time was Winston Churchill. “There is a lot of ruin in any nation,” he once mused. In Athens, 1944, Britain was “responsible for building up the nest of cockatrices for EAM [communist partisans] in Greece.” (His vocabulary was broad: A cockatrice is a mythical, two-legged dragon or serpent-like creature with a cock’s head.)
Nevertheless, the peace deal Churchill brokered between warring Greeks in 1944 had so many hilarious moments that, 75 years later, we may be permitted to indulge in lighter aspects.…
It is remarkable how we still encounter in Churchill words of astounding currency. A friend in Portland, Oregon asked for verification of a Churchill quotation: “A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril….” (“The Tasks which Lie Before Us,” House of Commons, 29 November 1944.) A good, solid maxim, but not out of the ordinary.
AND THEN my eye fell across what Churchill said a week later. Its current application, to Portland among other places, is remarkable. December 1944 Only two months after Greece had been liberated from German occupation, leftist elements of the government resigned and began an armed rebellion.…
Excerpted from Richard Cohen and Richard Langworth: “Witold Pilecki: A Deserving Addition to “The Righteous Among the Nations,” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. Mr. Cohen is a real estate lawyer based in London and head of the Essex Branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England. For the full text and illustrations please click here.
War aim or by-product?Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. (The story of Witold Pilecki.) New York: HarperCollins, 2019, $28.99, Amazon $20.49, Kindle $13.99.
By 1 August 1946 the world knew the full truth of the Holocaust.…
Everyone is familiar with Margaret Thatcher’s career. Everyone depending on their politics will have their own vision. It is left to say here what she meant to the memory of Winston Churchill, the prime minister she revered above all. More than anyone who lived at 10 Downing Street, she had real appreciation for him. She read his books, quoted him frequently, even hosted a dinner for his family and surviving members of his wartime coalition.
In 1993 she was in Washington to coincide with a Churchill Conference hosting 500 people, including 140 students, a dozen luminaries, and ambassadors from Britain and the Commonwealth.…
This tribute to an extraordinary Churchillian was written twenty-three years ago in 1997. Please pardon references to contemporary events no longer in the news, though it would seem that some other Redburn thoughts are startlingly relevant.
Ashley Redburn, Anglo-AmericanCynics sometimes suggest that Western Civilization needs a war every few generations to maintain its sense of values and faith in itself. Ashley Redburn was a man who believed it. “England,” he declared grimly, “needs to be conquered in war and occupied by a vengeful enemy before its spirit can be revived. Germany and France between them have ruined Europe for two centuries.…