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.”
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 Gathering Storm,” a film for television produced by BBC Films and HBO Inc.. Starring Albert Finney as Winston Churchill and Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine. First aired April 2002, 90 minutes.
Churchill films seldom engender unanimity. But everyone who watched the preview, by kind invitation of the British Consul in Boston, had the same reaction. “The Gathering Storm” is really good. Even in a cynical and anti-hero age, filmmakers still can avoid reducing Churchill to a flawed burlesque or a godlike caricature. Except for huge gap in the story line, “The Gathering Storm” is outstanding.…
"All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world.Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message." —WSC
I never planned to be a “historian.” I was a Chemistry drop-out at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1960), a fail-safe graduate of Wagner College (1963), a 120-day-wonder U.S. Coast Guard officer (1964-67), and a bored bureaucrat at the Pennsylvania Department of Health (1967-70). Chance sale of a car article landed me an editorship at Automobile Quarterly, then in its heyday. There, with the help of two brilliant editors, Don Vorderman and Beverly Kimes, I got into my bones the essentials of writing history. I left AQ to freelance in 1975 and have been, as my wife likes to remind me, unemployed ever since.…
