Barbara Leaming Archives - Richard M. Langworth

“Churchill Defiant,” by Barbara Leaming: Still the Best on Churchill Postwar

30 January 2022 Comments 0 Comments

Barbara Leaming: “Others Heard Taps, Churchill Heard Reveille”

Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, by Barbara Leaming. London: Harper Press, 394 pages.

“Great captains must take their chance with the rest. Caesar was assassinated by his dearest friend. Hannibal was cut off by poison. Frederick the Great lingered out years of loneliness in body and soul. Napoleon rotted at St. Helena. Compared with these, Marlborough had a good and fair end to his life.” —Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 1936, Book Two.

A decade on, still a book to read

Readers sometimes ask for the best books to read on Churchill’s career after the Second World War.…

Churchill Haters’ Feast of Jagan (Or: The Cheddi Gorge)

4 July 2020 Comments 0 Comments

Cheddi Jagan?! France’s foremost Churchill historian, Professor Antoine Capet of the University of Rouen, sends along a brand new Fake Churchill Calumny. (If the FCC didn’t have copyright, I’d register the initials.)

This one is from those fair and balanced entities, “Crimes of Britain” and the “Malcolm X Movement.” In the background, snidely, they play “Land of Hope and Glory.” It takes only 57 seconds to recite seven* long-disproven, shopworn Churchill sins—plus one new one: “Churchill ousted democratically elected Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana, 1953.” Congratulations. That’s really original!

*See list below.…

A Fresh Look at the Churchills and Kennedys by Thomas Maier

4 August 2015 Comments 0 Comments

When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, by Thomas Maier. New York: Crown Publishers, 784 pages, $30, Kindle Edition $11.99. Written for The Churchillian, Spring 2015.

The most touching and durable vision left by Mr. Maier comes toward the end of this long book: the famous White House ceremony in April 1963, as President Kennedy presents Sir Winston Churchill (in absentia) with Honorary American Citizenship—while from an upstairs window his stroke-silenced father, Joseph P. Kennedy, watches closely, with heaven knows what reflections:

Whatever thoughts raced through the mind of Joe Kennedy—the rancor of the past, the lost opportunities of his own political goals, and the tragic forgotten dreams he had once had for his oldest son, could not be expressed.…