Articles

A delightful happenstance came my way in Australia recently. My company builds and runs prisons under contract to various governments. I  was visiting a new prison we are building in New South Wales, near a town called Grafton on the Clarence River. Whilst touring this new and rather wonderful facility, I was stopped by the project manager. He asked if I were aware of the connection between Grafton and my grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill. I confessed I was not aware of any, so he took me down to the River Clarence, and showed me the broken hulk of a ship called Induna. She was the coaster that transported young Winston Churchill from Lourenço Marques, Portuguese East Africa (now Maputo, Mozambique) to Durban, South Africa after his dramatic escape from the Boers in December 1899.

He died in 1965 and Clare followed him five years later. Their relationship has been side-lined or ignored by many biographers more interested in politics than in Churchill’s private life. But the bust made by the “Obstreperous Anarchist” forever stands in the hallway of Chartwell. It is mute testimony to a family friendship that endured through tempestuous times.

Churchill was an early and steady supporter of a Channel Tunnel, which was first proposed in 1751. For most of his life he joined in lively and almost continuous discussion of  “a fixed link with the Continent.” Indeed, during the 1924-1929 Conservative government, Churchill was seen as “the leading political advocate of a tunnel.”

The Splendid and the Vile is the story of the London Blitz, from the moment that Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, until the Luftwaffe raid that destroyed the parts of the House of Commons exactly one year later, coincidentally on the same night that Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland.

These are just a few of the classical authors Churchill read in his self-education as a young man. They form an adjunct to the more recent and direct inspirations, the figures of more recent centuries.

Only a statesman with the broad tolerance of Winston Churchill could laugh off Shaw’s politics while acknowledging his literary genius.

Never Flinch, Never Weary, 1951-1965 is the twenty-third volume of documents in the official biography of Winston Churchill. Together with the narrative texts, the work comprises thirty-one volumes in all. It is the last step in a journey that began over half a century ago, but prepared for decades earlier.

For non-Russian-reading researchers, this book is indispensable. For aficionados of the history of the Second World War, it is a thought-provoking delight.

Our grief and loss are deeply felt. Paul was a gentleman scholar: a man of strong convictions, who never let them interfere with his search for truth. Hagiography is fatal. Honesty matters. Those were his cardinal precepts. Above all, he left a corpus of excellence from which young people will always learn things worth knowing. His work abides, and as Churchill said, a man never dies as long as he is remembered. All who love history will forever remember Paul Addison.

“Low is the greatest of our modern cartoonists,” wrote Winston Churchill in his delightful essay “Cartoons and Cartoonists.” He praised “the vividness of his political conceptions,” and declared Low a singular artist: “He possesses what few cartoonists have—a grand technique of draughtsmanship. Low is a master of black and white. He is the Charlie Chaplin of caricature, and tragedy and comedy are the same to him.”

Hillsdale was founded thirty years before Churchill’s birth. Its mission was to spread “sound learning” so as to help preserve “the blessings of civil and religious liberty” and “intelligent piety,” sentiments we believe were shared and typified by Churchill’s life’s work.

A close Anglo-American partnership was a guiding principle in Churchill’s thinking about international relations. The creation of such a partnership was a central aspect of his long political career. While still a young backbench Member of Parliament, he said, “it ought to be the main end of English statecraft over a long period of years to cultivate good relations with the United States.” In 1918 he declared it his hope that the two countries would “act permanently together.”