Paul Courtenay Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Munich Reflections: Peace for “a” Time & the Case for Resistance

15 November 2020 Comments 0 Comments

Journalist Leo McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee is a deft analysis of a political odd couple who led Britain’s Second World War coalition government. Now, eighty years since the death of Neville Chamberlain, he has published an excellent appraisal in The Spectator. Churchill’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Chamberlain negotiated the 1938 Munich agreement. “Peace for our time,” he famously referred to it. In the end, he bought the world peace for a time.

Mr. McKinstry is right to regret that Chamberlain has been roughly handled by history. “The reality is that in the late 1930s Chamberlain’s approach was a rational one,” he writes.…

Paul Courtenay 1934-2020: No Better Definition of a Pro

29 October 2020 Comments 3 Comments

It’s a shopworn phrase, but Paul Courtenay was a walking encyclopedia on Winston Churchill. We worked together on conferences, seminars, books and articles for thirty years. He was a major contributor to Finest Hour, the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, to books and biographies. Paul was indispensable. And he is irreplaceable.

As editor over those years I was constantly grateful that he was there. I had only to press his Heraldry button, his Smuts button, his Military button, his Foreign Affairs button, his Book Review button, for exactly what I needed. I never discovered how many such buttons he had.…

Lt. Churchill: “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals”

17 September 2017 Comments 1 Comment

With colleagues I discussed which of young Winston’s early war books was derisively called, “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals.” This was a popular wisecrack after his early works had the temerity to propose British military strategy in India, Sudan and South Africa. Churchill was in his mid-twenties at the time—but not reticent to speak his mind. Nothing we didn’t know here….

Malakand Field Force?

Without consulting references, I thought the “advice” line involved The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Churchill’s first book, 1898). I was influenced by its last chapter, “The Riddle of the Frontier.” Plenty of advice there, though it is as much political as it is military.…