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Neville Chamberlain
Why Calgary Needs a Statue of Sir Winston Churchill
03
Feb
2021
By MARK MILKE
The Calgary Churchill statue will celebrate Sir Winston’s prescience in peace, resolution in war, and lifetime quest for liberty and human rights.
Great Contemporaries: Eamon de Valera and a Long, Fraught Relationship
22
Jan
2021
By CHARLES LYSAGHT
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.
Hitler’s “Tet Offensive”: Churchill and the Austrian Anschluss, 1938
05
Nov
2020
1
By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
Breathless media admiration of Hitler’s Anschluss obscured German military deficiencies that might have mattered if the democracies had stood firm.
Tags:
Adolf Hitler,
Alexander Lassner,
Anschluss,
Case Otto,
Erich Raeder,
Geoffrey Dawson,
Hapsburg Empire,
Hearst press,
Hermann Goering,
Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Kurt von Schuschnigg,
League of Nations,
Little Entente,
Neville Chamberlain,
Richard M. Langworth,
Unity Mitford,
Versailles Treaty,
Werner von Blomberg,
Winston S. Churchill,
History as Prologue: Winston Churchill and the Historian as Statesman
17
Sep
2020
By JOSIAH LEINBACH
Churchill looked back on the past with reverence and with regularity—thankfully so, for we owe him the same debt we owe to our history: gratitude.
Tags:
David Lindsay Keir,
edmund burke,
Edward Gibbon,
George Santayana,
Harrow,
Henry Hallam,
J.H. Plumb,
Joseph Addison,
Josiah Leinbach,
Lady Randolph Churchill,
Lord Randolph Churchill,
Neville Chamberlain,
Sandhurst,
Thomas Babington Macaulay,
Tribe of Issachar,
Two-Power Standard,
William Shakespeare,
Winston S. Churchill,
“Churchill’s Phoney War” – by Graham T. Clews
26
May
2020
By WILLIAM J. SHEPHERD
Clews paints a loyal but frustrated Churchill who later defined the rule of the Phoney War: “Don’t be unkind to the enemy; you will only make him angry.”
Did Churchill order the Little Ships to rescue the soldiers at Dunkirk?
06
Dec
2019
By THE CHURCHILL PROJECT
It was not a broadcast appeal to the nation. Nothing so vague as that for Winston S. Churchill. It was his order to the Admiralty on 20 May 1940. The Admiralty then formed the Small Vessels Pool, in which private owners registered their craft for the mission and were given routes and charts.
Leo McKinstry on Churchill and Attlee: A Primer on Political Collegiality
29
Nov
2019
2
By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
McKinstry is thorough and scrupulously fair. Unlike too many historians today, he goes in with no axes to grind. He simply tells the story, backed by a voluminous bibliography, extensive research and private correspondence. In scope and balance, the book reminds us of Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill—another elegant account of two contentious figures. Like Herman, McKinstry captures Churchill’s generosity of spirit, and his rival’s greatness of soul.
Tags:
Alfred Duff Cooper,
Anthony Eden,
Arthur Herman,
Clement Attlee,
Clementine Churchill,
David Hunt,
Dresden,
First Quebec Conference,
Gallipoli campaign,
Gestapo,
H.G. Wells,
Harold Laski,
Harold Nicolson,
Horace Wilson,
Hugh Dalton,
India act,
Jock Colville,
King Edward VIII,
Leo McKinstry,
Liberalism and the Social Problem,
Neville Chamberlain,
Potsdam Conference,
Robert Menzies,
Ronald Cohen,
Stanley Baldwin,
The Aftermath,
The Other Club,
Trade Disputes Act,
Violet Attlee,
Wallis Simpson,
Winston S. Churchill,
Yalta Conference,
Bouverie’s Chamberlain: “A Mind Sequestered in its Own Delusions”
31
Oct
2019
By MICHAEL McMENAMIN
Bouverie’s dismissal of the 1938 plot as “probably correctly” a fantasy is quite inexplicable. He lists Meehan’s book in his bibliography along with the memoirs of Erich Kordt, who wrote that swallowing Hitler’s terms at Munich “prevented the coup d’état in Berlin.” Even Henderson, the pro-Chamberlain British ambassador to Germany, thought the Hitler plot genuine. On 6 October, a week after Munich, Henderson wrote Halifax: “By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime.”
Tags:
. Hans Oster,
Edward Halifax,
Erich Kordt,
Ernst von Weizacker,
Erwin von Witzleben,
Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin,
Franz Halder,
Hans Gisevius,
Hjalmar Schacht,
Ludwig Beck,
Michael McMenamin,
Nevile Henderson,
Neville Chamberlain,
Robert Vansittart,
Steven Roberts,
Theo Kordt,
Tim Bouverie,
Walter von Brauchitsch,
Walter von Brockdorf,
Wilhelm Canaris,
Winston S. Churchill,
Scaling Everest: Robert Hardy on Playing Churchill (Part 1)
17
Oct
2019
By T.S.R HARDY CBE FSA
"My panic was genuine. I felt I had no qualifications whatever to attempt a Titan. Thoughts of the friendliness in Churchill’s voice fled. Robert Hardy was to climb Everest in everyday clothes with an Ordnance Map."
The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War, by Robert Crowcroft
28
Aug
2019
By PAUL ADDISON
Both Churchill and Chamberlain understood that Nazi Germany was a time bomb. But whereas Chamberlain imagined that it could be defused by diplomacy, Churchill believed that it could only be defused by force, or the threat of force. When the diplomacy of appeasement failed Chamberlain was compelled to accept—albeit with the profound reluctance of a man who loathed war—that no other response was possible. In the final analysis the British Empire, which was already in decline, had to be sacrificed so that Britain itself could live.
Great Contemporaries: Alfred Duff Cooper
18
Aug
2019
By BRADLEY P. TOLPPANNEN
"I have forfeited a great deal. I have given up an office that I loved, work in which I was deeply interested, and a staff of which any man might be proud. I have given up associations in that work with my colleagues with whom I have maintained for many years the most harmonious relations, not only as colleagues but as friends. I have given up the privilege of serving as lieutenant to a leader whom I still regard with the deepest admiration and affection. I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter; I have retained something which is to me of great value—I can still walk about the world with my head erect." - Duff Cooper, 1938
Tags:
Alfred Duff Cooper,
Appeasement,
Archibald Wavell,
Douglas Haig,
Harold Nicolson,
J.L. Garvin,
Lady Diana Cooper,
Leopold Amery,
Max Beaverbrook,
Max Reinhardt,
Munich Pact,
Neville Chamberlain,
Richard Law,
Robert Boothby,
Singapore,
Talleyrand,
The Other Club,
Violet Bonham Carter,
Walter Elliot,
Winston S. Churchill,
Great Contemporaries: Leopold Amery
24
Jun
2019
By BRADLEY TOLPPANEN
Of all those appointed to his cabinet in May 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had known Leo Amery the longest—back to when they were schoolboys. Despite the longevity of their relationship, they were never very close. Rather, as Robert Rhodes James wrote, “there was always a definite restraint, a lack of warmth, a noticeable caution and reserve” between them. Nevertheless, Amery played a notable part in ensuring Churchill’s premiership.