Winston Churchill’s finest hours
By Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, December 19, 2012 - 0 Comments
The much-quoted British politician still makes headlines—47 years after his death
Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
When Winston Churchill was a young boy, he was convinced of his imminent importance. The late British prime minister “had a very strong sense that he was going to make his mark on history,” says Natalie Adams, an archivist at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, England. “So he kept everything. And we have everything.”
That includes drafts of speeches and correspondence with monarchs—as well as damning school reports, letters to his mother, and a stern warning from the security service that Cuban cigars received as gifts could be poisoned or rigged with explosives.
In October, Churchill’s personal papers were made available on the Internet. The archive is “the closest the U.K. has to a presidential library,” said Jonathan Glasspool, managing director of the publisher Bloomsbury Academic. “Its publication online will become a landmark in 20th-century historical studies.”
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Royal wedding? Get out of town!
By Leah Mclaren - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:09 AM - 2 Comments
A lot of Britons are planning to go on vacation instead of sticking around for William and Kate’s nuptials
Rosie Hallam/Zuma/Keystone Press
Monica Wright, 32, is a proud Londoner, but she is not sticking around later this month to wave the Union Jack for Prince William and Kate Middleton. Instead, like a growing number of Britons, Wright has booked passage out of the country—to her in-laws’ house in Majorca, Spain, where she plans to spend the big day sipping red wine by the swimming pool. “I hear a whole bunch of Barbour-wearing royalists are invading my city for the weekend,” she laughs. “If they want to put up bunting and drink tea from themed mugs, they’re entitled to do it—but personally, I’d rather have a holiday.”
She’s in good company. One survey earlier this year found that almost one-third of Britons were planning a trip away for the week of the royal wedding. While this estimate seems a bit high, Bob Atkinson, a travel expert at travelsupermarket.com, recently put the number at closer to two million holidaymakers for the royal wedding weekend alone. “That week is hugely busy,” said one sales representative at TrailFinders travel agency on High Street Kensington in west London. “People who are looking for flights are having a hard time finding anything. It’s been booked up for months.”
