Paul Rafferty’s magnificent Winston Churchill: Painting on the French Riviera is being translated for a French edition by Dr. Antoine Capet. The author and translator posed an interesting question. How did Winston Churchill spell “paintatious”?
(Any reader bored by pedantic, picayune, obscure meanderings about nothing of importance should stop reading now. For my review of Paul’s book see: “Book of the Year.”)
“Paintatious” was artist Churchill’s word for a scene worthy of his brush. He found many such venues on the French Riviera, which Paul explores so well. But this is a tricky question because “paintatioius” not a real word.…
Making the rounds again is an off-color piece of “Churchillian Drift.” Years ago, columnist Jonah Goldberg greeted its last appearance by calling it “A Thorny Porn-y Issue.” Porn-y maybe, Thorny not. Winston Churchill never said anything like it.
For connoisseurs of made-up Churchill quotations, here’s the alleged exchange. Sir Winston says to a woman at a social event: “Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?” The lady stammers: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill. Well, I suppose….”
Churchill interrupts: “Would you sleep with me for a fiver?” She responds hotly: “What kind of woman do you think I am?!”…
“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.…
Excerpted from “Great Contemporaries: T.E. Lawrence,” written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text and more illustrations, please click here.
Churchill and LawrenceIf the Almighty dabbles in the creation of individuals, He must have chortled when He conjured up Lawrence of Arabia. For here was the ideal adviser, foil and friend of Winston Spencer Churchill. To paraphrase WSC’s apocryphal quip, Lawrence possessed none of the virtues Churchill despised, an all the vices he admired.
He was “untrammeled by convention,” Churchill wrote, “independent of the ordinary currents of human action.”…
I’m Blanca Bueno, a journalist working in Barcelona for a cultural quiz show for Antena 3, Spanish television. (It is the equivalent of NBC’s “Who’s still Standing?“)
My work consists in writing the questions and checking if they are correct and well formulated, in order to be as precise as possible. We try not to spread wrong information to our contestants and our audience. Sometimes, to do this work, I need to contact to some experts, such as you, in this case. I need help verifying a question about Winston Churchill and lipstick.…
Readers reacted kindly to my essay on Alistair Cooke. I venture to add some private Churchillian moments at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods. I sent these to still-living participants, who urged I publish them—with strategic edits to protect the innocent.
“I’ve been using microphones before you were born”Commander Larry Kryske USN was our toastmaster for the 1988 Mount Washington Churchill dinners. I remember particularly his naval declaration after dinner: “The smoking lamp is lighted.” (How odd that sounds now! In my experience, group smoking stopped almost dead around 1990.) Larry sends this amusing memory of that night, 27 August:
During his address, Sir Alistair appeared to be having trouble with the mic.…
My brother Andrew Roberts inspired this post, when he asked for Churchill quotations about childbirth. Yes, even now, friends have brought a new life into the world. Three months ago, my son and daughter-in-law did likewise.
Life Goes OnOn 30 May 1909, Clementine Churchill was pregnant with their first child, Diana. Winston, asking her to practice social distancing, wrote these beautiful words: “We are in the grip of circumstances, and out of pain joy will spring, and from passing weakness new strength will arise.”
Four and one-half decades later, his daughter Mary was a fortnight overdue for the birth of Charlotte, her fourth child.…
“Churchill’s Christmas” is excerpted from a two-part article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text with footnotes, please click here.
To Churchillian colleagues, and most of all those who have encouraged and supported our Churchill work at Hillsdale College so many years: thank-you for being our friends.
Washington, 24 December 1941“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter… Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.…
“Randolph Churchill: Present at the Creation,” is taken from a lecture aboard the Regent Seven Seas Explorer on the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise around Britain, 8 June 2019. Continued from Part 1.
Randolph Churchill PostwarOut of the Army and Parliament in 1945, and divorced from Pamela in 1946, Randolph Churchill led a “rampaging existence,” his sister Mary wrote. “He always had lances to break, and hares to start.” He was loyal and affectionate, but he “would pick an argument with a chair.”
In 1948 he married June Osborne and fathered his second child, Arabella.…
