Winston Churchill

The wartime prime minister as leader, painter, friend.

It may well be impossible ever to make a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby that can successfully live up to the full majesty of the novel. Hollywood has tried it five times, each with disappointing results despite impressive casts including Robert Redford and, most recently, Leo DiCaprio. The…

In this seminal episode, the Substandard discusses Darkest Hour. Is it better than Dunkirk (take a wild guess)? JVL explains to Sonny how watches work. Sonny recalls his Chris Farley-like interview with Gary Oldman. Vic's Elf on the Shelf turns into Annabelle. Plus JVL on the real Churchill and the…

Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an…

November 2 marks the centennial of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, the first international recognition of a Jewish homeland. The Declaration was enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1922, and effectively reaffirmed by a United Nations vote in 1947. The Declaration was impelled…

What is one to think as one watches the clown show in the White House, the train wreck in Congress, and the multi-vehicle accident that is conservatism today? We’re inclined (as we so often are) simply to quote Winston Churchill, in this case speaking in 1931 about Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald:

What is one to think as one watches the clown show in the White House, the train wreck in Congress, and the multi-vehicle accident that is conservatism today? We’re inclined (as we so often are) simply to quote Winston Churchill, in this case speaking in 1931 about Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald:

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

Monuments to Winston Churchill abound in the United Kingdom. You can remember the greatest man of the 20th century at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, or by his grave nearby at Bladon. Then there are the Cabinet War Rooms in London, his country house, Chartwell, and, of course, the magnificent…

Monuments to Winston Churchill abound in the United Kingdom. You can remember the greatest man of the 20th century at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, or by his grave nearby at Bladon. Then there are the Cabinet War Rooms in London, his country house, Chartwell, and, of course, the magnificent…

Bill Kristol uses a great quote from Churchill in the service of urging all of the various Republican/conservative factions to come together and remove Donald Trump from the ticket.

Jazz musicians, like their colleagues in the other performing arts, are not exactly known for being politically conservative. Hear of a jazz project with political overtones, and you can be forgiven for expecting that it will have a stridently left-wing "message."

Almost two terms later, Barack Obama is still defending removing the Winston Churchill bust from the Oval Office. Obama delivered his defense today in London, England, at 10 Downing Street, in a joint press conference with David Cameron.

Reviews and News:

After the astonishing German break through the French lines in May 1940, Winston Churchill flew to Paris to meet his French counterpart, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, and army chief Maurice Gamelin. Reynaud had called Churchill in near-hysterics, but even Churchill wasn’t prepared for the utter…

Seventy-five years ago today, on May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. Conservative prime minister Neville Chamberlain was rebuffed by Labour in his request to join him in a National Government, and at 6 pm, King George VI asked Winston Churchill to form a government. Churchill…

Friday marks the seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe, or V-E, Day, when the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender after six long years of war. No one should have savored that day in 1945 more than Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister. Yet he was to a…

Sir Martin’s passing was a sad day for who call ourselves Churchillians. His 8-volume biography of Sir Winston Churchill and the Companion volumes are the Everest of all biographies, and an indispensable source for anyone interested in the great man’s life and achievements. That this quiet,…

The passing of Sir Martin Gilbert at the age of 78 marked a sad milestone. He achieved popular acclaim as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, the man whose in-depth eight-volume biography served as the gold standard reference work about the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He…

The death of Sir Winston Churchill, 50 years ago last week, reminds The Scrapbook that, while a half-century is a very long time, Churchill’s lifetime is closer to us than we suspect. Indeed, in the words William Faulkner gave to Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t…

Many Brits are known to enjoy a pint a day. Winston Churchill certainly did—though his daily ration was a pint of champagne, not ale. So it was fitting that the wartime prime minister was toasted last week in Washington with clinking glasses of bubbly. House speaker John Boehner invited a small…

Scrapbook correspondent Richard M. Langworth, the author and longtime president of the Churchill Centre in Washington, D.C., weighs in on the new statue of Gandhi to be erected in London .  .  . 

The debate over Obamacare may remind a student of British history of the debate in Britain over the National Insurance Act of 1911, which was in effect until the initiation of the welfare state after World War II. The protagonists in that debate (like ours, not formally a debate, but implicitly…

These observations of his on the Middle East have easily withstood the test of time:

Congress has rebuked President Obama. It may have come in a subtle or backhanded way and thus was ignored by the media. It may not have been intentional. But it was a rebuke nonetheless.

Seventy years ago today, Winston Churchill received an honorary degree from Harvard University and addressed its faculty and students in the university’s largest room, Sanders Theater.

Winston Churchill on the Middle East:

There was one moment in President Obama’s world-weary press conference last Tuesday when he seemed genuinely interested and engaged. At the very end, when Obama had already begun to depart the podium, a reporter shouted a question about the previously obscure but now famously gay NBA center, Jason…

This magisterial three--volume biography of Winston Church-ill, begun by William Manchester nearly 30 years ago, has at last reached completion, though the path to its finale took a circuitous trip through the wilderness, reminiscent of Churchill himself. The Last Lion is doubtless the most popular…

After his defeat in Britain’s 1945 general election, Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine consoled him: “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” Churchill replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.”

The following excerpts of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy address, which will be delivered later today at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, have been released for preview by the Romney campaign:

Perhaps because Mitt Romney is a Winston Churchill fan and Barack Obama is not, I thought this morning of Churchill's "end of the beginning" remarks, delivered almost 70 years ago, at Mansion House in London, on November 10, 1942.

Not long ago I was in Boston browsing the stacks of that legendary emporium, the Brattle Book Shop, when I chanced upon Winston Spencer Churchill: Servant of Crown and Commonwealth, a collection of tributes to the parliamentarian, war leader, historian, and wit, which his longstanding English…

After first insisting columnist Charles Krauthammer was wrong to say that President Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy when he first became president, the White House is now apologizing. Here's the letter White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer sent to…

At an event in London, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, "I'm looking forward to the bust of Winston Churchill being in the Oval Office again."

Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post reports that Rick Perry on Sunday channeled the boss and defended the four Marines:

There’s some light at the end of the tunnel. Just a thin ray, and at the end of a very long tunnel littered with government and private debt.

The celebration of American Independence has a way of illuminating the Anglo-American relationship, especially during times of war. Although July 4, 1776 marked the date when the American people dissolved "the political bands which have connected them" with Great Britain, July 4, 1940 signified…