Resources

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer here a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as we know it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery—while for weeks his faithful lieutenants secretly ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Episode 8 of "The Wilderness Years" captures a dramatic scene from Churchill’s memoirs. Chamberlain, he wrote, “had scarcely ceased speaking when a strange, prolonged, wailing noise, afterwards to become familiar, broke upon the ear. My wife came into the room braced by the crisis [and] we made our way to the shelter assigned to us, armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts.” There, to his astonishment, Churchill is cheered by Londoners.

Britain’s surrender of military parity with Germany is nowhere better illustrated than through these episodes recalling the events of 1937-38.

Flying Peril: The threat of a German air force superior to Britain’s, denied for years by British leaders, proved only too true. This fifth episode of “The Wilderness Years” introduces two of the people who, at the risk of their careers, provided Churchill with secret information on German rearmament.

In Munich on 30 August 1932, six months before Hitler took power in Germany, Winston Churchill came as close as he ever would to meeting Hitler face to face, amid sobering scenes of marching, chanting brownshirts singing Die Horst Wessel Lied.

"Wars are not caused by the build-up of weapons. They are caused when an aggressor believes he can achieve his objectives at an acceptable price." - Margaret Thatcher

The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of Time. But words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but, leaping across the gulf of ages they light the world for us today. In this article, Lewis E. Lehrman explains how Churchill and Lincoln were both students of history and were both determined to act historically.

"Churchill welcomed me with old-fashioned Victorian courtesy, bade me sit down, and we at once embarked on history, paying me the compliment of taking me for the professional, himself the amateur."

President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill found themselves challenged by wars of national survival. Even though their early lives appear to be different, there are similar aspects in their educational preparation.

Defying the notion that Winston Churchill has little to say to us today, over 500 registrants and 200 students attended a Hillsdale College seminar on the celebrated statesman sponsored by Hillsdale’s Center for Constructive Alternatives and Churchill Project for the Study of Statesmanship. Numerous participants who have dedicated their lives to Winston Churchill offered erudite remarks at the event, including Minnie Churchill.

Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, speaks at Hillsdale College on September 22, 2005 as part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series.