Jock Colville Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Athens, 1944: Some Lighter Moments in a Serious Situation

8 October 2020 Comments 1 Comment

“There’s a lot of ruin in any nation…”

The Greeks are still not laughing about their mid-1940s civil war, so levity may be inappropriate. Nor was at the time was Winston Churchill. “There is a lot of ruin in any nation,” he once mused. In Athens, 1944, Britain was “responsible for building up the nest of cockatrices for EAM [communist partisans] in Greece.” (His vocabulary was broad: A cockatrice is a mythical, two-legged dragon or serpent-like creature with a cock’s head.)

Nevertheless, the peace deal Churchill brokered between warring Greeks in 1944 had so many hilarious moments that, 75 years later, we may be permitted to indulge in lighter aspects.…

How Churchill Polished and Improved His Writing by Constant Revision

19 December 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Condensed from “Constant Revision,” an article under my pen name for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text click here.

Revision and redraft

We are asked: “As I recall Churchill labeled his manuscripts something like “draft,” “almost final draft” and “final draft.” Do you recall what those categories were?”

We cannot establish that he routinely used those labels. Instead he tended to use “revise” or “revision.” Frequently his finished draft was marked “final revise.” It often took a long time before, with a sigh of relief, his private office staff reached that point.…

The Brendon Bestiary: Churchill’s Animal Friends and Analogies

12 September 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Piers Brendon, Churchill’s Bestiary: His Life Through Animals. London, Michael O’Mara Books, 2018, 320 pages, Amazon $18.96. Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the full text, click here.

“An enormously agreeable side of his character was his attitude toward animals,” Sir Anthony Montague Browne, his last private secretary, said of Winston Churchill. “Although a Victorian—and they were not notably aware of animal suffering—he had a sensitivity well in advance of his time.” Ever since Sir Anthony said that we’ve been waiting for a good book on the subject, and historian Piers Brendon has obliged.…