Daily Telegraph Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964

22 November 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964, edited by Sir Martin Gilbert. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, 415 pages, Amazon $8.95. This updated review was first published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Emery Reves, from the ground up

Admirers of Sir Martin Gilbert were pleased and touched to see his chronicle appear, now over twenty years ago. But few expected it would amount to much more than a useful research tool. We were wrong, and quickly realized why Sir Martin and Wendy Reves were so keen to get it published.…

Read More Read More

Nashville (3). Churchill and Women’s Rights

23 October 2017 Comments 1 Comment

Votes for Women, Yeas and Nays

Among the more pernicious distortions of Churchill’s record is that he was a lifetime opponent of rights for women, including their right to vote. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from part 2….

In 1999 Time magazine explained that Churchill could not be “Person of the Century” because he “bulldoggedly opposed women’s rights.” In 2012 London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: “Churchill believed that women shouldn’t vote, telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.’”

As I show in my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, Churchill never said those words, in or out of Parliament.…

Read More Read More

cruz churchill — Ted Cruz (L). Maybe if he’d smoke a cigar? (Daily Telegraph)

Senator Cruz: Minor Misquote, Major Misinterpretation

16 April 2016 Comments 1 Comment

Ted Cruz, speaking on 5 April, “sparked an outcry” by misquoting Churchill: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, Cruz intoned, “we risk the future.”

The London Daily Telegraph reported: The references drew a swift—and fierce—reaction from social media.” Social media is not a likely place to contemplate the fine points of history. It wasn’t in this case, as you can read in the newspaper article.

What Cruz said was “…risk the future.” For Churchill it was more than risk. In his “Finest Hour” speech, 18 June 1940, Churchill told Parliament: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find that we have lost the future.”…

Read More Read More

Boris: What Winston Would Do, Part 13,783

25 October 2014 Comments 0 Comments

Colorful politicians willing to say what they really think are rare prizes. But publishing a book on Churchill doesn't convey the right to judge what he would do today. The answer Lady Soames always gave when people said such things was: "How do you know?"

Read More Read More

Why Churchill Shunned Pipes and Cigarettes

10 April 2012 Comments 0 Comments

A friend sent me a Dunhill feature from the Daily Telegraph, stating that Churchill occasionally smoked a pipe as a holiday from cigars: “I can find no reference to him having ever smoked a pipe, can you?”

I think Dunhills are stretching. I can find no testimony to Churchill ever smoking a pipe. There are indications that he deplored pipe smoking (though he tolerated it from Sir Arthur Tedder). Perhaps this arose through his antipathy (which grew in the early 1930s) to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

By looking for Baldwin references, I found a key cigar-and-pipe standoff between Churchill and “SB” in 1924, when they were on better terms, in Martin Gilbert’s Winston S.…

Read More Read More

Winston Churchill was Not a Zionist?

12 January 2012 Comments 0 Comments

The Churchill Society of Israel serves Israelis with an interest in Sir Winston Churchill, according to Russell Rothstein, quoted in the January 9th Daily Telegraph: “Churchill’s long-standing support of Zionism and friendship with the Jewish people make it particularly appropriate that the modern state of Israel have a local organisation devoted to his memory and to preserving his thoughts, words and deeds for future generations.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, added: “Churchill was very familiar with the Old Testament. He wrote about the Children of Israel who “understood and adopted ideas which even ancient Greece and Rome, for all their power, failed to comprehend.…

Read More Read More

135 Years: Raise a Glass

30 November 2009 Comments 0 Comments

“A few curmudgeons have flamboyantly abstained from joining in this birthday greeting; but they are so few that their action merely emphasises the fact that personal respect and friendship habitually survive and transcend political conflict in the Mother of Parliaments. It is particularly appropriate that these all-party tributes on his birthday should be paid to one, the outstanding fact of whose character and career is that he has never been happier than when leading men of all parties and men of no party in some great national cause. He has never ceased to combine zeal for reform with reverence for tradition.…

Read More Read More

Obama and the Churchill Bust -Out

4 March 2009 Comments 0 Comments

Ever since the BBC and The Daily Telegraph revealed that President Obama had sent George W. Bush’s Jacob Epstein Oval Office bust of Winston Churchill packing (while retaining the bust of Abraham Lincoln), the media has been abuzz with speculations over the implied symbolism.

Personally I think the media just demonstrates its degenerate irresponsibility to keep fanning these non- issues. Fifty years ago a different media would have published some thoughtful pieces on the future of the US-UK relationship. Not any more.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose….When President Bush had a Churchill bust in the Oval Office, zealots would occasionally demand its return, since in their view Bush was undeserving, or was using it to proclaim himself another Churchill.…

Read More Read More