If a man is coming across the sea to kill you, you do everything in your power to make sure he dies before finishing his journey. That may be difficult, it may be painful, but at least it is simple. We are now entering a world of imponderables, and at every stage occasions for self-questioning arise. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
—Winston S. Churchill, 18 February 1945
It was recently asserted that Churchill doesn’t have much to say to us today, and that the only people who use Churchill as a guide nowadays are “over-testosteroned American neocons.”…
“Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate.” William Manchester’s inscription, quoting Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, a Churchill favorite, on my second volume of his Last Lion, reminds me that Bill was himself for many of us “Captain of the Gate”; and that his death in 2004 bid fair to deprive us of finale of the most lyrical Churchill work ever written.
Not quite. Twenty-four years on, Little Brown has published the third and final volume of this famous biography, subtitled Defender of the Realm 1940-1965 (1232 pages, in hardbound, Kindle and audio editions).…
Brandy Banter: The Evening Standard described ArArAt Armenian brandy, once reserved for Communist party elite. It was “the brandy that Stalin served Churchill” according to consumer business editor Jonathan Prynn:
The prime minister enjoyed ArArAt brandy when it was served by Stalin at the Yalta conference in February 1945. After the Second World War, the Soviet leader arranged for Churchill to be sent 400 bottles every year.
This seems highly doubtful. There is no record in the Churchill Archives Centre of even a bottle of brandy being sent to Churchill—although he did compliment Stalin on an Armenian brandy served at Yalta.…
The diaries of Churchill’s youngest and only living daughter, Mary Soames, are to be published on her 89th birthday, September 15th, by Doubleday UK, and is available for shipment worldwide from Amazon UK. An e-book will also be available. American publication will be in May 2012 by Random House in New York. The Amazon UK price is £16.50 ($26.50) and airmail shipment to the USA costs about £7 ($11).
Much younger than her siblings, Mary had an idyllic youth, growing up at Chartwell, her father’s beloved Kentish home, but always in the background was his preoccupation with the growing threat of Hitler, and in 1939 the war arrived, and with it Mary’s life was dramatically altered.…
“Is World War II Still ‘the Good War’?” by Adam Kirsch. The New York Times Sunday Book Review, 27 May 2011. Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at The New Republic, offers a thoughtful piece of deconstruction which dredges up every major Churchill critic of the past five years, all in one handy if verbose article. As a sampling of the Churchill fever swamps, it is unsurpassed.
The question we are asked to consider is whether World War II was really a “good war.” War is hell, which is why western democracies like Britain and France spent six years trying to avoid it.…
What is the truth about Churchill suffering from depression, which he referred to as his “black dog”? —A.L. Kansas
Churchill himself makes a few early mentions of his “black dog,” but the expression is much older than he was. It was frequently used by Victorian nannies, like Churchill’s Mrs. Everest, when their charges were in a dark mood. One reference dates it to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Visit the Churchill Centre search engine and enter “Black Dog”; you will be led to numerous illuminating references. The first one is by his daughter Lady Soames, who I think has it right:
A lot has been made of the depressive side of his character by psychiatrists who were never in the same room with him.…
