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I plan to see it a third time. The other day I went to see DARKEST HOUR, the movie about Winston Churchill’s heroics in the spring of 1940 in steeling the British upper classes to resist Hitler and to relieve Dunkirk by sending off a civilian armada to rescue the British army from the Nazis. The hour was very dark indeed. Aware as you might be of my aversion to movies, allow me to astound you further. This was not the first time I went to see Darkest Hour. It was the second time! I might see it again. The...

There could be no starker illustration of the profound differences that exist between Washington and London -- despite alignment on many other issues -- than comments this week by our two leaders on climate change and the environment. For President Trump, the Paris Agreement is a bad deal that will close US businesses -- perhaps even has closed some already. Meanwhile, in London last week, Prime Minister Theresa May was launching the UK's 25-year Plan for Nature. Its flagship pledge is to "leave the environment in a better state than we found it". The evidence is entirely against the world...

Many in Tonypandy and Llanelli saw Churchill as someone who would use troops against workersTourists line up each day in Whitehall to enter Winston Churchill’s subterranean war rooms and Gary Oldman is a favourite to win an Oscar for his portrayal of the Prime Minister in The Darkest Hour. The Conservative leader was voted the “greatest Briton” of all time in a television poll in 2002 in which he was championed by Mo Mowlam, perhaps the most enduringly popular Labour figure of modern times. Wholehearted admiration for Churchill unites the UK – but not, perhaps, in Wales. Stories of his...

Please pardon the vanity. I just saw Darkest Hour. It was really excellent and moving. Both history and drama. Some lines and scenes are obviously fictionalized. The scene with Churchill riding the subway is silly, but I understand the need for dramatic license. It is about the last three weeks of May 1940. Churchill becomes Prime Minister, even though Chamberlain, Halifax, and King George dislike him. Hitler invades France, which becomes a rout. Halifax insists on peace negotiations with Hitler. Churchill wavers, but decides to fight on. It is impossible to say what might have happened if Britain had made...

Churchill is an abidingly popular role with big-time actors once the receding hairline and expanding girth of middle-age set in. Sometimes the player is too evidently suited to the part - one thinks of Robert Hardy on telly in the Eighties - and the jowly gravitas gets clanked around as if Winnie wandered Chartwell and Westminster in never-was-so-much-owed mode 24/7. On the literal face of it, the man who brought both Sid Vicious and Commissioner Gordon to the silver screen is one of the least obvious cinematic Winstons ever, and he wears his lavish prosthetics with a very light touch....

In a key episode, Churchill went to the larger Cabinet and won overwhelming approval for his stalwartness. Here, he made his famous statement, “We shall go and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.”  After the war, Churchill wrote of the reaction of his colleagues: “Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and came running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is...

Margaret Thatcher granted the deathbed request of a spy who masterminded one of the greatest World War II operations. Ewen Montagu wanted to find out the official verdict on Operation Mincemeat, an audacious plan which helped change the course of the war by fooling the Nazis into diverting their troops to the wrong place. Newly-declassified National Archives files reveal that Mr Montagu, a judge who volunteered for the Navy during the war, wrote to Mrs Thatcher from his deathbed with his request.

Comparing the late Prime Minister Winston Churchill to President Donald Trump is guaranteed to elicit scorn from intellectuals, for one was a prolific man of letters, while the other speaks in the vocabulary of the common man. One was a journalist and scholar, while the other is a builder, deal-maker, and master persuader (as Scott Adams argues). And one smoked and drank prolifically, while the other abstains from both. But beneath the veneer of literary styles, there are obvious historical similarities between Winston Churchill's becoming prime minister and Donald Trump's shocking election to the American presidency. It is hard to...

For the first half of this century, during one of the longest active political careers in this country, Winston Churchill was interested and sympathetic to Zionism. Hating tyranny in all its forms, he had reacted strongly against the Tzarist pogroms in the first years of the century and always understood the desperate need of a haven for Jews. “I recognise,” he wrote in a private letter on 2 January 1906, “the supreme attraction to a scattered and persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and freedom.” Two years later, on 30 January 1908, he...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) in a tweet Tuesday compared President Trump to British leader Winston Churchill. Huckabee said he had just been to see the film “The Darkest Hour,” which dramatizes Churchill's experiences as prime minister during World War II, calling it a reminder of “what real leadership looks like.” “Churchill was hated by his own party, opposition party, and press. Feared by King as reckless, and despised for his bluntness,” Huckabee tweeted. “But unlike Neville Chamberlain, he didn't retreat. We had a Chamberlain for 8 yrs; in @realDonaldTrump we have a Churchill.”

Unlike "Dunkirk" it was ALL acting. Coming off the Trump victory the timing of it's release is interesting. Too many not-so-subtile similarities. He's gruff, his own party abandons him, his family keeps him going and he has to deal with a bunch of wusses who are too cowardly to see what's going on. He's alone and he get's his inspiration from the common people he meets on the subway. Theater was pretty much filled-matinee. Upon leaving I observed that most everyone was older. BTW FDR was useless. Chamberlain still thought they could negotiate for peace.

Looks to be a great film.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it “a date that will live in infamy.” But in Google-land, where every other esoteric anniversary/birthday on the face of our diverse, multi-cultural, all-inclusive planet is celebrated to much fanfare, they just couldn’t bring themselves to even mention it. It would probably be considered triggering and that might send the snowflakes to the streets again, screaming.Imagine what the world would be like today if the Greatest Generation had decided to hold a day of rage rather than fight the people who attacked us.  Imagine if Winston Churchill had told his countrymen to go “scream helplessly at...

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as...

Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour butchers history to make the British prime minister a much less decisive figure than he actually was. Because an irresolute and small-minded age applies its own neuroses backward to history, because actors love to portray internal torment, and because we fancy ourselves so sophisticated that we know the official story of the past to be a ruse, movies about important historical figures have become less inspiring and “more human,” at times even iconoclastic... Now it’s Churchill’s turn to be shrunken down to a more manageable size. In Darkest Hour, which is set across May and June...

I just got back from seeing Dunkirk and I was impressed. Speaking as a military historian it seemed accurate enough for a film that is quite clearly stated to be a fictional account with fictional characters not a docudrama. I was worried that a modern treatment might head towards the politically correct or the overly mawkish, but, it delivered what I was hoping to see. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag...

Video LinkBest video trailer I have ever seen.And, yes, this might be a repeat post.That said, if a movie trailer ever deserved a second post...this is it.Churchill awakened a nation to an existential threat once over 75 years ago. He just might do it again.

The new polymer bank notes appear to have had an unintended effect in stopping people snorting cocaine. The plastic notes have been leaving people with cut noses after they use them to sniff the drug.

His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death. The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father...

Churchill and the Holocaust: The Possible and Impossible International Churchill Society 25th Anniversary International ConferenceU.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,Washington, 8 November 1993Martin Gilbert, CBE First of all I would like to say that I am sure, like everybody here who has been around the Museum today, I am still very much under its impact, and I, too, would like to pay my tribute to Yeshayahu Weinberg, whom I first knew when he was devising the marvelous Beit Hatefusot Museum in Tel Aviv, the museum of the history of the Jewish people in the diaspora. I think the work he has...