Daily Mail Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Shocking Facts: “Nuke the Soviets”

11 November 2014 Comments 4 Comments

November 5th— A call from the London Daily Mail: “We are doing a piece on a new book and wanted to run it by you.”

November 6th— The new book is Thomas Maier’s When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys. What’s exciting is their discovery of a Shocking Fact about Churchill (Shocking Fact #22,385, by my count.)

Mr. Maier reports, calmly and dispassionately, a 1947 conversation between Churchill and Senator Stiles Bridges (R-NH). In it, Churchill says “that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin wiping it out, it would be a very easy problem to handle the balance of Russia, which would be without direction.”

So—wow—the Mail is really onto an exposé.…

“OMG”: Churchillian Origins of the Texters’ Phrase

10 August 2013 Comments 0 Comments

“I work for the New York Times Upfront, a magazine run by Scholastic Inc. and the New York Times for high school students. We hope you can verify a recent piece of news. The Daily Mail has published a letter written September 9, 1917, by Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral John Fisher, to First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, where he first used the acronym O.M.G., for “Oh My God.” As you know, “OMG” is a phrase often used by texters, especially teenagers! Is Fisher the originator, and is there a handwritten version of his letter to Churchill?” —A.P., New York, N.Y.…

Churchill the Young Carouser

23 March 2013 Comments 2 Comments

Michael Shelden, author of Young Titan, a new biography of Churchill, set London media buzzing with speculation that young Violet Asquith attempted suicide after Churchill decided to marry Clementine Hozier (Finest Hour 158: 6). Not only that, reports the Daily Mail, “He caroused with West End call girls and proposed to THREE society beauties—who turned him down.”

The society beauties were Pamela Plowden, Muriel Wilson and the actress Ethel Barrymore. But the most rakish thing Mr. Shelden reports Churchill doing is showering Miss Barrymore with “armfuls of flowers” and showing up at Claridge’s each night after her West End play ended, where he would “insist she have dinner with him.”

The rest of the media’s lurid headline—“He caroused with West End call girls”—has mainly to do with the 83-year-old story of Churchill as a Sandhurst cadet, standing up for the showgirls of the Empire Theatre when “prudes on the prowl” attempted to erect barriers sheltering their lair from more upright society.…