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Saturday, August 10, 2013

A Kind of Dignity and Even Nobility: Winston Churchill’s “Thoughts and Adventures”

Amid These Storms: Thoughts and Adventures, by Winston Churchill [1]
This material progress, in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race…. No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. – “Fifty Years Hence”
Winston Churchill wrote the essays gathered in Thoughts and Adventures while his generation was “in its twelfth lustre,” and with the passing of years his book is now almost as old. First published in 1932, while he was out of the government in what his biographer Martin Gilbert calls his “wilderness years” (the book is now available here, ed.). Despite this modest revival, Thoughts and Adventures stands, with many of Churchill’s works, as an undiscovered classic of twentieth-century prose.



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