Great Contemporaries: Lady Violet Bonham Carter (Part 2)

Lady Violet: “He had no doubts about his star. He felt that he had been preserved through many perils in order to fulfil its purpose.”

Hopkins to Churchill, 1942: “‘Where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’…Even to the end.”

Winston Churchill was not a man to bear grudges, and firmly admired the Irish. Yet he was strangely oblivious to the widespread, albeit not universal, hostility still felt towards him in nationalist Ireland. In 1953 he faced a libel action in Ireland arising out of his memoirs. It was brought by Eric Dorman-Smith, an Irish-born general whom he had dismissed during the Desert War. He expressed doubt that “an Irish jury would necessarily be unfair or that they would be prejudiced against me.” His legal advisers knew better. They made sure the case was settled before it got to be heard before a jury in Dublin. When Churchill died in 1965, de Valera, now President of Ireland, lauded him as a great Englishman. He could not omit to add the rider that Churchill had been a “dangerous enemy” of the Irish people.

Churchill and the media is a larger story than author Toye tells, and the omissions are as disappointing as the assertions are disconcerting.

Churchill's best war books: “fascinating products of the human spirit, epic tales filled with the depravities, miseries, and glories of man.”