Churchill was not a guy who got down on himself

Charles Moore:

...

So strong was his sense of entitlement that he suffered from no serious self-questioning about any role that fell to him. In his memoirs, he says that his reaction to becoming prime minister in May 1940 was "a profound sense of relief". That is an extraordinary phrase to use about taking up the most difficult job ever performed by any Englishman, but it fits.

When Churchill was buried 40 years ago tomorrow, he received the only non-royal state funeral of the century. Big Ben was hushed. A gun in Hyde Park fired once a minute for 90 minutes – one for each year of his life. The Dockland cranes dipped in salute. Churchill's only instruction for his funeral was that there be "plenty of bands" (there were), but there can be no doubt that he would have been quite unembarrassed by the fuss. Nicholas Soames told me that, when a boy, he once entered the study at Chartwell and said to Churchill: "Grandpapa, is it true that you are the greatest man in the world?" "Yes, now bugger off."



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more