Tag: Lady Randolph Churchill

Old Kerfuffles Die Hard: The Churchill Papers Flap is Back

Old Kerfuffles Die Hard: The Churchill Papers Flap is Back

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.…

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Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare (Hearsay doesn’t Count)

Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare (Hearsay doesn’t Count)

Extract­ed from “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s ‘Racist Epi­thets,'” for the Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project. For the orig­i­nal arti­cle, please click here. Read­ers please note: a foot­not­ed ver­sion of this arti­cle will be pub­lished this year in a Hills­dale jour­nal of Churchill Studies.

Epithets and expressions

In recent weeks Win­ston Churchill has become a tar­get of igno­rance. “Racist,” read the spray-paint­ed label of the mob on his Lon­don stat­ue. He should be knocked from perch, plinth and promi­nence. Some his­to­ri­ans claim he used all the racist epi­thets we abhor, from the n-word  to nation­al­i­ties: “As the great trib­al leader of 1940,” read one account, “his glo­ri­ous speech­es were pep­pered with ref­er­ences to the British race.”…

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“American Jennie” and Other Books on Lady Randolph Churchill

“American Jennie” and Other Books on Lady Randolph Churchill

A read­er requests rec­om­men­da­tions for good books about Sir Winston’s moth­er, Lady Ran­dolph Churchill (1854-1921). The most round­ed and thor­ough­ly sourced is Anne Sebba’s Amer­i­can Jen­nie (2007). Bar­bara Lang­worth pub­lished a thor­ough review and analy­sis of Jennie’s many accom­plish­ments, below. Scroll to the end for a Bib­li­og­ra­phy and com­men­tary on oth­er books about Lady Ran­dolph. RML

Barbara F. Langworth: The Right Parent Survived

Jen­nie Churchill: Winston’s Amer­i­can Moth­er, by Anne Seb­ba (Lon­don, Mur­ray, 2007).  Amer­i­can Jen­nie: The Remark­able Life of Lady Ran­dolph Churchill), (New York: Nor­ton, 2007). 

It may seem a new sto­ry to many read­ers, since the pre­vi­ous biogra­phies of Lady Ran­dolph Churchill date back up to eight decades.…

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