Casablanca Conference Archives - Richard M. Langworth

“Every chance brought forth a noble knight”: Jill Rose, “Nursing Churchill”

27 August 2018 Comments 0 Comments

Jill Rose, Nursing Churchill: A Wartime Life from the Private Letters of Winston Churchill’s Nurse. Foreword by Emma Soames. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2018, 286 pages, $27.95, Kindle $20.02. Reprinted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For Hillsdale reviews of the hundred Churchill works published since 2014, click here. For a list and description of books about Churchill since 1905, visit Hillsdale’s annotated bibliography.

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Jill Rose…

…begins this fine World War II narrative with a friendly warning. Don’t wait till your parents are gone before preserving their memories. The parents of “baby boomers,” Rose writes, lived through the most momentous times of the 20th century.…

Why the Turks Like Churchill

18 June 2017 Comments 13 Comments

How great was Atatürk? The question came up examining Turkish attitudes to Churchill, which one might expect would be hostile. In 1914, Churchill’s Admiralty denied Turkey two battleships being built in Britain as World War I erupted. In 1915, Churchill pushed hard (though did not conceive of) the attacks on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. (See also “comments” on this post from thoughtful Turks.)

Atatürk

One historian speculated that Churchill mirrored the courage and resourcefulness of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Another said there “might be a lingering impression that Churchill had helped save Turkey from the red menace by his resistance to Russian demands on the Dardanelles Straits—of course it was Harry Truman who did the heavy lifting there [through the Truman Doctrine]”

The Turks have abundant reasons to feel positive toward Churchill, aside from his personal courage, and his post-1945 resistance to Soviet designs on the Dardanelles (when he was out of office and powerless).…

Maisky and Churchill: Hard to Put Down

8 June 2016 Comments 0 Comments

Ivan Maisky: “The greatest sin of modern statesman is vacillation and ambiguity of thought and action.”

Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 634 pages, $28.80, Kindle $19.99, audiobook $36.32.

Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read in full, click here.

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A striking work of scholarship (actually an abridgement of a three-volume complete work coming in 2016), this book will inspire fresh scholarship on Churchill, Russia and World War II. Ivan Maisky was a penetrating observer of 1932-43 Britain, and Gabriel Gorodetsky connects every long gap in his diaries with informed accounts of what was happening.…