King Edward VIII Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Troublesome Toffs: The Duke of Windsor and Bendor Westminster

20 November 2021

“A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.”

The wisecrack, wrongly attributed to Churchill, was actually uttered by his Liberal ally, David Lloyd George. (Allegedly LG said it in 1909, during their battle to reform the House of Lords,) It didn’t make Churchill more welcome at Blenheim Palace, where his cousin the Duke of Marlborough forbade the name of LG in conversation.

The Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII) and the 2nd Duke of Westminster are occasionally attacked for their “near-treasonous activity in support of the Third Reich.”…

“Darkest Hour,” the movie: an interview with The Australian

28 December 2017

For The Australian …

Troy Bramston of The Australian newspaper had pertinent questions about the new movie Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. With the thought that Troy’s queries might be of interest, I append the text of the interview.

The Australian : Of all the things Winston Churchill is purported to have said and done, the myths and misconceptions, which are the most prevalent and frustrating for scholars? None of these appear in the film, but there are three things that rankle: 1) The lies—that he was anxious to use poison gas; that he firebombed Dresden in revenge for Coventry; that he exacerbated the Bengal famine, etc.…

Churchill Bio-Pics: The Trouble with the Movies

10 August 2017

“The Trouble with the Movies” was published in the American Thinker, 5 August 2017.

David Franco, reviewing the film Churchill, starring Brian Cox, raises questions he says everyone should be asking. “Isn’t the ability to accept one’s mistakes part of what makes a man a good leader? …. To what extent should we rely [on] past experiences in order to minimize mistakes in the future? These are the questions that make a bad movie like Churchill worth seeing.”

Well, I won’t be seeing this bad movie. Described as “perverse fantasy” by historian Andrew Roberts, it joins a recent spate of sloppy Churchill bio-pics that favor skewed caricatures over historical fact.…