Articles

The first key to sales is an intriguing title and Mr. Napier succeeds admirably in that regard. But a reader expecting the “goods” will be rather surprised that the preamble and first chapter praise Churchill’s warnings of the need to rearm in the face of Nazi Germany, and his condemnation of the Munich Agreement. Napier then adds several straightforward chapters covering the early days of the war and Churchill becoming prime minister.

Speaking of Britain and its Empire in 1941, Winston Churchill said: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”1 A few weeks earlier he had advised the boys at Harrow School: “Never give in—never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”2 The image he conveyed is one of hardiness and personal toughness, and it galvanized his countrymen. Yet we rarely give thought to where he found the hardiness and resilience he conveyed.

"Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe."

Folly demonstrates how two different concepts of how foreign policy is proposed and executed affected Anglo-Soviet relations during World War II.

His daily routine involved two principles, the first learned from Napoleon: strength of force in the most crucial places. The second principle was economy of effort.

Churchill was a devotee of Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) the English poet, short-story writer and novelist, who in 1907 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kipling’s majestic novels of the old Empire struck a romantic chord in the young Winston. Later they studded his books and speeches.

“The splitting up of the campaign in the Mediterranean into two operations, neither of which can do anything decisive, is, in my humble and respectful opinion, the first major strategic and political error for which we two have to be responsible.” - Churchill to Roosevelt

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project is privileged to receive photos and memorabilia that add to our Churchill collection. Laura Crosby of Summerville, South Carolina, sent us the historic photos shown here, from the collection of her parents, Eugene and Kathleen Sloan. They round out our picture of Churchill’s June 1942 visit to America, and his first encounter with U.S. troops at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

Many students of his canon consider that the hero is Churchill as he liked to imagine himself then. An appreciator of beauty and fine living, Savrola cannot live "in dreamy quiet and philosophic calm in some beautiful garden, far from the noise of men" while the life of the nation is at stake. "'Vehement, high and daring,' was his cast of mind. The life he lived was the only one he could ever live; he must go on to the end." Forty years later the novelist would exhort his countrymen: "We shall go on to the end....We shall never surrender."

I’ve been slogging through the William Manchester Churchill trilogy, The Last Lion. How is Hillsdale’s eight-volume Winston S. Churchill by Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert different?

In 1960 General Lord Ismay said that an objective Churchill biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts’ book will be “unique even to jaded Churchillians.”

Like Thucydides, Churchill wrote to teach. To convey what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done is the essence of political leadership. War is a violent teacher. Churchill strove always to be a good student and to pass on what he learned.