I am doing some work for my English AS course and need a comparative piece to go with a poem I am studying. I have tried looking for Winston Churchill’s goodbye letter to his wife but have been unsuccessful. Is there any way I could even have a part of the text of the letter for my studies? —A.S., UK
A: “In the event of my death…”This was a great and memorable letter. After his removal as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, Churchill spent six uneasy months in a sinecure position, unable to influence war policy.…
I have been told that Churchill arrived late for a meeting with HM The Queen, expressing his regret by saying, “My sincere apologies Madam, I started too late.” But I haven’t found any reference to this. Can you help? —A.P.H., England
A: His perennial viceChurchill had somewhat cured his unpunctuality in later years, when as prime minister he commanded prompt transportation. He was not known to be late for Queen Elizabeth II. But his unpunctuality was known to have displeased the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII (1901-10). And here is the source of your story.…
Paul Rafferty’s magnificent Winston Churchill: Painting on the French Riviera is being translated for a French edition by Dr. Antoine Capet. The author and translator posed an interesting question. How did Winston Churchill spell “paintatious”?
(Any reader bored by pedantic, picayune, obscure meanderings about nothing of importance should stop reading now. For my review of Paul’s book see: “Book of the Year.”)
“Paintatious” was artist Churchill’s word for a scene worthy of his brush. He found many such venues on the French Riviera, which Paul explores so well. But this is a tricky question because “paintatioius” not a real word.…
“Boris Johnson, who has sought comparison with Winston Churchill, denounced spending national lottery money to save the wartime leader’s personal papers for the nation,” chortled The Guardian in December. (The Churchill Papers cover 1874-1945. Lady Churchill donated the post-1945 Chartwell Papers to the Churchill Archives in 1965.)
In April 1995 Johnson, then a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, deplored the £12.5 million purchase of Churchill Papers for the nation. The lottery-supported National Heritage Memorial Fund, said Johnson, was frittering away money on pointless projects and benefiting Tory grandees. Johnson added: “…seldom in the field of human avarice was so much spent by so many on so little …”
The Memorial Fund replied the Churchill Papers were a national heirloom under threat of being sold outside the country.…
The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has just republished “Scaling Everest,” Robert Hardy’s recollections of playing the Wilderness Years Churchill. They are from 1987, his speech to one of our Churchill Tours, at the Reform Club, London. We are grateful to his executors, Justine Hardy and Neil Nisbet-Robertson for permission to reprint. For Part 1, click here.
I thought the occasion appropriate to republish my original review of the “Wilderness Years” from 1981, some years before we met. I thought at the time I had “laid an egg”—in Churchill’s phraseology, not RH’s.…
Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to her Son John Julius Norwich 1939-1952, Chatto & Windus, 2013, 520pp.
Lady Diana Duff Cooper had a penetrating mind and brilliant pen, capable of capturing a time when women considered the world laden with opportunity for fulfillment.
She proved this with her famous seven-year performance in Max Reinhardt’s “The Miracle.” Her “Winston and Clementine,” first published in The Atlantic just after Sir Winston’s death, was as fine a tribute to the Churchill marriage as we are likely to encounter.Her collaboration with her husband’s ambassadorship to France was notable.…
