![]() Just give us a sense of where he fits in history, what he was mostly known for.ĬANDICE MILLARD: So usually when we think of Winston Churchill, we think of World War II. Some of our younger listeners may not know as much about him. You know, when I was growing up, Winston Churchill was very much a part of our consciousness. FRESH AIR's Dave Davies spoke to her about her new book, "Hero Of The Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape, And The Making Of Winston Churchill."ĭAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Candice Millard, welcome to FRESH AIR. After participating in three foreign conflicts, Churchill finally became famous in England during the Boer War where he showed courage and heroism in battle and managed a daring escape from a prison camp even though he was there not as a soldier but as a correspondent for a British newspaper.Ĭandice Millard has written two best-selling books, both about episodes in the lives of American presidents - "Destiny Of The Republic" about James Garfield's assassination and "The River Of Doubt" about Teddy Roosevelt's trip up the Amazon River. In her new book, Millard writes about Churchill in his early 20s, full of political ambition and desperate to distinguish himself as a soldier. ![]() ![]() Our guest, Candice Millard, tells the story of a critical moment in the early life of a towering figure of the 20th century, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Great leaders are often associated with an early biographical story. ![]() Of course some works of art, such as the Kincaid seen above, are more expendable than others.This is FRESH AIR. And whereas we may mourn the “extra badness” lost to history in the untold stories of Lord Byron’s incinerated memoirs, “there is nothing attractive about the extremes of the Larkinian”. It is easy to disagree with him on this point – surely our understanding of an author better informs the work – but Gekoski is correct that our view of Larkin “is probably more sympathetic” as a consequence, and this undoubtedly helps us to focus on the poetry. There are some things, it seems, Gekoski would rather not know (the revelations about the private life of Eric Gill have “ruined” Gill’s art for him). But the real explanation is that the contents were likely to be so distasteful. It is for quite another reason that Gekoski finds it “hard to regret the destruction of Larkin’s diaries”, by Larkin’s lover Monica Jones – and that is because they were never “meant” for public consumption in the first place. One wonders how the public would now react if Prince Philip decided to feed Lucian Freud’s portrait of the Queen to the Windsor hearth. Gekoski notes that Lady Churchill had form in this area, having demolished portraits of her husband by Walter Sickert and Paul Maze, and argues, unconvincingly, that the Churchills had “ample justification” for their actions because the painting was commissioned “to honour, and it didn’t”. He considers Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill, a commission by Churchill’s parliamentary colleagues on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, in 1954, which the British Prime Minister despised (“it makes me look half-witted, which I ain’t”) and which was later destroyed at the request of Churchill’s wife, Clementine. Toby Lichtig considers when it is acceptable to destroy works of art:įor Gekoski, there are no simple answers.
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