Excerpted from “Creating Jordan with the Stroke of a Pen on a Sunday Afternoon,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, August 2021.
Q: On creating TransjordanWhat is the veracity of this alleged quote by Churchill, which has many versions? “In his later years, he liked to boast that in 1921 he created Transjordan (6/7ths of the British Palestine Mandate, today’s Kingdom of Jordan, ‘with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo.’” The source cited by The New York Times is “Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State,” edited by Alexander C.…
Excerpted from “Great Contemporaries: T.E. Lawrence,” written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text and more illustrations, please click here.
Churchill and LawrenceIf the Almighty dabbles in the creation of individuals, He must have chortled when He conjured up Lawrence of Arabia. For here was the ideal adviser, foil and friend of Winston Spencer Churchill. To paraphrase WSC’s apocryphal quip, Lawrence possessed none of the virtues Churchill despised, an all the vices he admired.
He was “untrammeled by convention,” Churchill wrote, “independent of the ordinary currents of human action.”…
