Search Results for: EU

Morley
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn. (Painting by Walter William Ouless, public domain in USA)
John Morley, Victorian Eminence: “Such Men Are Not Found Today”

John Morley, Victorian Eminence: “Such Men Are Not Found Today”

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Morley pronounced the epitaph for his age in May 1923, four months before he died. His words sound more like 2023.  "Present party designations have become empty of all contents…. Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits’ end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate?"  

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Jock
“I’m not as influenced by scenic beauty. I am more curious about what tasty creatures live among the bushes.” (National Trust, Chartwell)
Jock: Churchill’s Cat, by Larry Kryske

Jock: Churchill’s Cat, by Larry Kryske

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Here Kryske captures what most reporters ignore: the great man’s sadness in twilight. Clementine reminds him of all the good he had accomplished. Winston Churchill feels only remorse. “I have profound misgivings about the future. Our leaders are more concerned with appearance than substance. Grave dangers lie before us. Who will be the voice in the wilderness now?” Does that say anything to us in 2023? I fear so.

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Long Island
Langworth, Birzten, McCardy leaving “Island Link” to bicycle Long Island.
Long Island, Bahamas by Bicycle: A Trip to Remember

Long Island, Bahamas by Bicycle: A Trip to Remember

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Lying 100 miles southeast of Eleuthera, Long Island is 80 miles long and has roughly the same area. But it is flatter and relatively empty. There are only twelve people per square mile compared to Eleuthera's year-round seventy. The inhabitants are welcoming, but a team of cyclists tackling their 73-mile-long Queen’s Highway is not something they see every day.

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Churchill's London
Little known but important: the old London Magazine near the Serpentine, Hyde Park. An 1805 Palladian-style villa, it once housed naval cordite for the defense of London. In 1911, war threatened over the Agadir Crisis. Observing the Magazine was unguarded, Churchill sent a marine detachment. His decisive action helped convince Prime Minister Asquith to appoint him First Lord of the Admiralty, where he prepared the Royal Navy for war. For years abandoned, it reopened in 2013 as an art gallery then a restaurant. (Zaha Hadid Architects)
Visitor’s Guide to the REAL “Churchill’s London”

Visitor’s Guide to the REAL “Churchill’s London”

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"Cast your eye from the entrance on the War Rooms slightly to the right. You’ll see a doorway well above ground. To the right of that doorway you will see a set of six windows ending in a curved window at Storey’s Gate. Those are the actual rooms in which Winston Churchill slept and worked during the Second World War."

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Tucker
1948 Tucker. (Photo by Rex Gray, Creative Commons)
The Tucker Story (No, It Wasn’t the Car to Beat Detroit)

The Tucker Story (No, It Wasn’t the Car to Beat Detroit)

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For all his brilliance, Preston Tucker "was out of his pond. He remained a stranger and perhaps even a threat to the SEC, and he didn’t know anyone in government. Preston was careless in some of his pencil-work, perhaps in a bit of his talk, too. Nevertheless. Tucker conceived an amazing automobile. Nevertheless, the government did overreact, despite all he did to earn it.

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Jefferson
Dinner for Western Hemisphere Nobel Prize Winners at the East Room, the White House, 29 April 1962. Gathered for a reading by actor Frederic March of excerpts from the works of late Nobel laureates are (L-R): Lady Bird Johnson, Pearl Buck, President Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Frost and Agnes Charlier Jarring, wife of Swedish Ambassador Gunnar Jarring. (Photo by Robert Knudsen, JFK Library, public domain)
“Since Thomas Jefferson Dined Alone”…. JFK, Winston Churchill

“Since Thomas Jefferson Dined Alone”…. JFK, Winston Churchill

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Churchill's Jefferson: "He came from the Virginian frontier, the home of dour individualism and faith in common humanity, the nucleus of resistance to the centralising hierarchy of British rule. He was in touch with fashionable Left-Wing circles of political philosophy in England and Europe, and, like the French school of economists who went by the name of Physiocrats, he believed in a yeoman-farmer society. He feared an industrial proletariat as much as he disliked the principle of aristocracy. Industrial and capitalist development appalled him."

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Lili Marlene
Woodford remembers: The Churchill statue at Woodford Green, Essex, sculpted by David McFall, dedicated 1959. (Acabashi, Creative Commons)
Churchill Anecdotes: Epping, Woodford, “Lili Marlene,” Fitzroy Maclean

Churchill Anecdotes: Epping, Woodford, “Lili Marlene,” Fitzroy Maclean

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"On 4 July 1942 the 8th army held the line at El Alamein.... You’d see the glow from their cigarettes and pipes, and the little glow from the radio dial. After the news we'd switch over to the "Message from Home" program from Germany. And before long it would go Ompa Ompa—and there was Lili Marlene.... And the 8th Army swept on, capturing on its way 800 miles of desert, 75,000 prisoners, 5000 tanks, 1000 guns, and the famous enemy song of Lili Marlene." —Denis Johnston

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Rhodes James
Sir Robert Rhodes James saw 1939 as the year that ended Churchill’s “Study in Failure” and heralded his sequel, “A Study in Success.” On 5 November 1939 near Avesnes, France, WSC meets British Expeditionary Force Commander Field Marshal John Gort. Lt.-Gen. Henry Pownall, Chief of Staff, who would later assist WSC in writing his war memoirs, is at right. (Imperial War Museum, public domain)
“A Good House of Commons Man”: Robert Rhodes James

“A Good House of Commons Man”: Robert Rhodes James

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Randolph Churchill had sacked Robert from his research team on the Official Biograhy, and Robert never forgave him (or his dislike of Eden). He maintained that Randolph just repeated the “case for the defence” Sir Winston had already made in his own books. Robert always said exactly what he believed—in the most forceful terms available to a gentleman. In an age of prevaricating phonies of Left and Right, such a character is rare. Winston Churchill would have loved him.

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automobile
Alec Issigonis at the Austin Longbridge works with the first Mini (621 AOK) and a new 1965 Morris Mini Minor. (Birmingham Museums Trust, Wikimedia Commons)
Chequered Past: Of England and the Automobile

Chequered Past: Of England and the Automobile

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It sounds irreligious, but I’ve never been able to relate to Ferraris. Give me a quirky English rig with an interesting pedigree and a shape you don’t see every day. There’s something about the smell of leather, the way the rain beads on the bonnet, that reminds you of the day when almost anybody in England could build a sports car, and most of them did. A worker in Coventry once said to me about the Triumph TR6: "It rides hard and smells of oil, mate. They just don't make cars like that any more!"

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best
Churchill plants a boutonniere on President Truman before dining at the British Embassy, Washington, 8 January 1953. Six months later he was not sending bouquets. (Library of Congress, public domain)
Churchill Quotations: The Best Telegram He Ever Sent

Churchill Quotations: The Best Telegram He Ever Sent

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"I warned the Americans before Potsdam not to withdraw from any of the part of Germany we occupied until we had a satisfactory understanding. They would not listen. And they will not listen now when I warn them about Germany. At Potsdam I wanted Prussia isolated and Germany divided horizontally and not vertically." —Churchill according to Moran

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