Kenya Tembo

See: ‘Philosophy in a Time of Terror’: discourse with Jürgen Habermas, downpage

Black Dog

 ‘Black Shuck’, folkloric spectre, East Anglia, England, sightings still reported.

Black Shuck or Old Shuck is the name given to a ghostly black dog which is said to roam the Norfolk, Essex and Suffolk coastline. The Legend: For centuries, inhabitants of East Anglia have told tales of a large black hellhound with malevolent flaming eyes (or in some variants of the legend a single eye) that are red or alternatively green. They are described as being ‘like saucers’. According to reports, the beast varies in size and stature from that of simply a large dog to being the size of a horse. The legends of Black Shuck roaming the Anglian countryside date back to the time of the Vikings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Shuck

"All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed; and
Third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Inference is a legitimate historical method - Jomo, God and Modernity, John Lonsdale. (Tembo: Yes, but perhaps the most easily challenged, and difficult to defend.)

‘Kenyatta went into prison as a self-seeking and irresponsible agitator, over fond of the bottle, paunchy, given to rhetoric, a sick man with a short life expectancy. He came out of prison with his health much improved, a mature, hard-working elder statesman with a breadth of understanding rare in African politics, and a willingness to work with the British to achieve peaceful independence. For this Wouse must receive much of the credit.

All the minor events of the imprisonment, the attacks on Kenyatta, his illnesses, his special treatment, have been buried in secrecy.’ P195, ‘Jomo’s Jailor’, Elizabeth Watkins, see below: Wouse Kenyatta’s British interlocutor.)

Lokitaung - desolation hell-hole, see Tembo14

This man was Lt. Col. de Robeck. He had served in Burma during the war where he had met China, and now became friendly with both China and Kenyatta, on occasion driving them to his  house to borrow books. His sympathy may have arisen partly from his recognition of Kenyatta's  poor health. In his handing-over report to Tennent in 1955 de Robeck revealed that Kenyatta's  heart rate was so high that he was expected 'to snuff it' at any moment, and that he was not  supposed to put his head down to his feet. Should the expected occur, a ready-written telegram lay in his desk drawer, to secure an immedate visit of a high-powered doctor and an unprejudiced post-mortem. Turkana Annual Report.1955.

Kenyatta had indeed been seriously ill. In addition to the heart complaint he developed eczema, a usual enough complaint in Turkana, but his condition was greatly exacerbated by the Asian doctor who gave him an innoculation against smallpox. He became so ill that doctors had to be flown from Nairobi. Others became concerned, and many important visitors, including the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, flew into Lokitaung to see the prisoners.

Turkana had been unaffected by Mau Mau, except for the prisons and the number of visitors who now arrived. Normally distances were too long and the roads too rough to attract senior  officers on tour, and even the Provincial Commissior visited only once a year. Then suddenly in 1954 visitors started to arrive. Wouse listed them: they included the Provincial  Commissioner, the Commissioner of Prisons, the Director of Medical Service, the Secretary for  Welfare and Development, the Provincial Medical Officer, and the Prison Medical Adviser.

This influx was to continue year after year, each lot of visitors bidding the administrators  goodbye with the words, 'I don't expect you see many visitors up here.' Lokitaung Annual  Report, 1954. P186, ‘Jomo’s Jailor’, Elizabeth Watkins

‘Some years ago Frank Kitson, who had been in charge of Kenyatta's detention, told me that the real decision was whether or not to let him kill himself by giving him the bottle of spirits he was then demanding and consuming every day. The decision Kitson took — to refuse him drink and dry him out — was a fateful one in Kenya's history.’ R W Johnson, review in 2005 of BRITAIN'S GULAG: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, by Caroline Elkins; and HISTORIES OF THE HANGED: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, by David Anderson. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article408636.ece

'One story widely believed by the general public and at least some government officers at the time Mzee was serving his sentence at Lokitaung in the Turkana district I can refute categorically. It is common knowledge that prior to his arrest Mzee was a true gentleman in that he could see any man under the table where the consumption of alcohol was concerned.......

'In prison at Lokitaung Mzee and his fellow convicts were obliged to submit from the start to prison regulations. No exceptions of any kind were made. He submitted to the regulations as a common convict. He never grumbled and never asked for the special diet. I do not have to confirm that prison regulations forbid access to alcohol or drugs and access to food provided from outside. But despite this common knowledge the story got around that Mzee was being provided with a bottle of brandy a day. I was personally acquainted about this by a friend at a lunch at the then Chief Native Commissioner's (a friend) who asked me if there was any truth in the story.'.

Thirty years after the events described, Wouse took three pages of wavering foolscap to lead up to his rumour, analyzing why it might have been put about, and another three pages to deny  it, explaining that he went up to inspect sufficiently often to be sure that nothing like  this occurred. The hurt must have gone deep, because it smirched the quality of his 'rapport' with the President, turning it into a cupboard love.' PP196,197 Leslie Whitehouse [nickname: ‘Wouse’] papers.’ from Jomo's Jailor, by Elizabeth Watkins, see: Wouse Kenyatta’s British interlocutor below.

Cover of 'Facing Mount Kenya'

Depression, alcohol and antabuse

Depression And Alcoholism

‘Depression is a complex medical disorder and has been recognized since the days of Hippocrates. The disorder has been portrayed in movies, literature and the arts for many centuries. No one culture or ethnic group is immune from the ravages of depression. In the 1950s and 60s, depression was categorized into two types, endogenous and neurotic (reactive). Endogenous depression is caused by something inside the body, perhaps genetic or maybe just plain bad luck. Neurotic or reactive depression has a definitive external precipitating factor, such as the death of a spouse, friend, child or loss of a job. In the 1970s and 80s, the global impact of depression was fully realized and the focus of attention shifted from the cause of depression to its effects on the afflicted individuals and their treatment.

Today, most health care experts agree that irrespective of the classification, depressive disorder is a syndrome (group of symptoms) that reflects a sad mood over and above normal sorrow or grief. More specifically, the sadness of depression is characterized by a larger intensity and duration and by more intense symptoms and functional disabilities than is seen in normal.

There is a lot of evidence that depression in some individuals with alcoholism may be related to excessive alcohol consumption, intoxication and/or withdrawal effects that mimic some depressive disorders. Although the link between depression and alcoholism is well established, the reason for this association is not understood. Some believe that perhaps both alcohol and depression may have similar etiology- possibly resulting from heavy alcohol drinking, or there may be an indirect connection which may be related to excess alcohol intake that may predispose on to depression. It is hoped that if an association between major depression and alcoholism can be established, this may provide health care professionals a better understanding of the two diagnosis and hopefully a improved treatment.

One of the largest study conducted in the USA revealed that there is a significant association between previous alcohol dependence and current or recent major depressive disorder. These researchers suggest that treatment of depression should not be withheld in recovering alcoholics because of the concern that the symptoms may represent prolonged intoxication or withdrawal effects. Treatment of recovering alcoholics may reduce the risk of relapse.’ http://www.alcoholtreatmentclinics.com/depression-and-alcoholism/

‘Fifty two patients with psoriasis (n=38) and eczema (n=14) abusing alcohol had significantly reduced blood nicotinic acid levels. Total nicotinic acid in these two groups of patients was only 270±3.2 and 385±12.8 mg% respectively compared with its normal value 620±4.6 mg%. Free and albumin-bound nicotinic acid levels were 183±1.6 and 87±1.0 mg% respectively in psoriatic patients and 301±10.7 and 84±2.1 mg% in patients with eczema compared with 310±2.3 and 310±4.6 mg% respectively in healthy subjects (n=37). The heavy drinkers had the most severe forms of either disease characterized by extensive rash, strong itching, desquamation, and moist skin.  Therapy of these conditions encountered great difficulty.  Preparations of picamilon and vitamin B6 (pyridoxal phosphate) were used in combination with piracetam (Nootropil) to treat 28 patients with psoriasis, eczema, alcohol abuse.  Based on high therapeutic efficiency of these products bringing blood nicotinic acid levels to normal, they are recommended as choice agents for combined therapy of patients with psoriasis and eczema abusing alcohol.’

http://www.picamilon.net/picamilon/picamilon-20.htm 

Nickel Eczema and Antabuse

‘Drugs that interfere with nickel and cobalt metabolism may cause flare-up reactions in patients who are sensitive to these metals. Veien described four nickel-sensitive patients who experienced flares of dermatitis after the initiation of Antabuse (disulfiram) therapy for alcoholism. Disulfiram chelates nickel. Two of the patients in this study developed vesicular hand eczema.

Case studies of patients who inadvertently developed dermatitis while being treated with Antabuse for chronic alcoholism are paralleled by studies of the deliberate use of Antabuse as a chelating agent in the treatment of nickel-allergic patients............Nickel levels in the plasma and urine of alcoholics treated with disulfiram remained high during the treatment period. The aforedescribed experience indicates that nickel may cause systemic contact dermatitis and that recurrent vesicular hand eczema may be one of the clinical features of this type of dermatitis.’ P154, Hand Eczema By Torkil Menné, Howard I. Maibach

http://books.google.com/books?id=oAPYANdl7BMC&pg=RA1-PA154&lpg=RA1-PA154&dq=eczema+%2B+alcoholism&source=web&ots=IS1TjHdeGJ&sig=GQ2tZE152h6Y4hWnVJ7eEOkAqBI#PRA1-PA154,M1

History and Antiprotozoal use

‘The drug's action was discovered by accident in 1948 by the researchers Erik Jacobsen, Jens Hald, and Keneth Ferguson at the Danish drug company Medicinalco. The substance was intended to provide a remedy for parasitic infestations; however, workers testing the substance on themselves reported severe symptoms after alcohol consumption.[citation needed]

A study reported that it may be potentially useful in the treatment of Giardia infection.[1] Another study found that it had activity against Trichomonas vaginalis which was resistant to the most common treatment, Metronidazole.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram

‘Self-doubt, depression, drugs, and alcohol’

       Marilyn Monroe

‘In 1955, she [Marilyn Monroe] founded her own company with Milton Greene, Marilyn Monroe Productions, and signed a new contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. She made the 1956 movie Bus Stop which wowed the critics, but she'd begun to lose herself to self-doubt, depression, drugs, and alcohol.

Marilyn Monroe, whose mother and maternal grandparents had all struggled with mental illness and institutionalization, began taking sleeping pills for her insomnia. She regularly consulted psychiatrists. She drank heavily, and began a habit of arriving late to work, and sometimes not being able to work at all.

She married Arthur Miller, the playwright, shortly after Bus Stop was released, and for the marriage converted to Judaism. She lived quietly for two years with her new husband. During that time, Miller was fighting his conviction for contempt-of-Congress for refusing to answer two questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The marriage, and several miscarriages, added to her self-doubt and depression, and to her use of drugs and alcohol.’

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marilynmonroe/a/marilyn_monroe.htm' 

Marilyn Monroe and 'Jack' Kennedy

Monroe's health deteriorated during this period, and she began to see a Los Angeles psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. He later recalled that during this time she frequently complained of insomnia, and told Greenson that she visited several medical doctors to obtain what Greenson considered an excessive variety of drugs. He concluded that she was progressing to the point of addiction, but also noted that she could give up the drugs for extended periods, without suffering any withdrawal symptoms.^[96] According to Greenson, the marriage between Miller and Monroe was strained; he said that Miller appeared to genuinely care for Monroe and was willing to help her, but that Monroe rebuffed while also expressing resentment towards him for not doing more to help her.^[97] Greenson stated that his main objective at the time was to enforce a drastic reduction in Monroe's drug intake.^[98]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe

Glamorous, gorgeous, flatulent - the secret history of Marilyn Monroe

By Emily Dugan

Tuesday, 10 July 2007

She may have been the very epitome of Hollywood glamour, but Marilyn Monroe was flatulent, ate in bed and rarely washed, according to a new book............

.............The 1961 film, which had been written by the playwright Miller as a Valentine's present especially for his wife Monroe, has always been surrounded by gossip. It tells the story of a despairing divorcee who falls in love with a cowboy. It turned out to be more of an accurate assessment of the rocky state of her relationship with Miller than a romantic gesture. The couple divorced a few months later, and Miller ended up marrying the film's photographer, Inge Morath.

The Misfits was the last film that either Monroe or Gable worked on before they died. Gable was the first to go, dying from a heart attack two weeks after shooting finished. Monroe's suicide followed a year later. The film's third lead, Montgomery Clift, died from years of drug and alcohol abuse four years later.

During a stressful shoot, the director John Huston took to keeping late nights, gambling and sleeping on set.

Miller and Monroe's marriage broke down during filming, and Monroe was increasingly turning to prescription drugs and alcohol. Filming in the scorching Nevada desert had to be stopped in August 1960 so she could be sent to hospital for detox. It was this instability, combined with the steamy scenes on set that led people to believe an affair might have taken place. Miller's last play, Finishing The Picture, which tells the story of a drug-addled actress almost preventing a film going ahead, is widely believed to be a thinly veiled memoir of filming The Misfits.

Marilyn Monroe on the set of 'The Misfits', her last film

‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.’ Winston Churchill

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. 
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson  (1803 – 1882).

Asante sana to the other Mzee, as always, and eternally.

I relished your choice of quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which I have circulated fairly widely, and to which I expect varying responses. If you will permit me, in advance I wrote this general reply:

‘Well, I would interpret this as saying that great art, drama, films, literature, indeed, any peak of creative human endeavour, including political leadership, is by its nature inherently inconsistent, i.e. it rises above petit bourgeois consistency. Rigorous consistency for those who preach it is a defence for ignoramuses against the unknown, exotic and strange; especially in the sexual realm, such as the stigma against miscegenation. By all means practice consistency in what you say and do, but recognize its confines for the human spirit; and that it is only an arbitrary, mechanical means of fending off uncertainties in the past, present and future, in other words, life itself. Rigorous consistency implies certainty and absolutes, when in reality, there are none – except perhaps, love, and even this cannot be depended on not to turn turtle.’

But there are workable solutions.

(Tembo: This relation of Churchill’s love of fine wines and other alcoholic beverages is intended as a light-hearted reference, to set the above in its historical context. Many people in a position of  power during the 1940s and 1950s thought and expressed themselves publicly very differently about alcohol consumption, than they would now be allowed to by 'political correctness'; they were not petit bourgeois. Drunks, however, were never socially acceptable – you held your drink, and words and deeds in check.  Mea Culpa, and so many apologies.)

'Next to these political and literary achievements, his [Winston Churchill’s] contemporaries and the generations thereafter are still fascinated and entranced by his sheer joie de vivre. He sported the lifestyle of a true sybarite. Martin Gilbert’s 8-volume life -- in and of itself one of the great achievements of political biography of the 20the century -- devotes pages on end to Churchill’s rambling late-night sessions. Churchill must have downed more champagne, port and brandy in his long life span than all these great leaders taken together (Stalin was not bad downing his vodkas either). Only Hitler and Stalin kept his associates up into the wee hours of the morning as mercilessly as did Churchill, holding forth on their strategic views. Yet Churchill’s intellect was more profound. They all kept their associates waiting the next day until noon to make important decisions (Hitler fitfully slept through the early hours of the D-Day invasion).'

Lecture to the Churchill Society of New Orleans, Windsor Court Hotel, November 30, 2006, Winston S. Churchill and the Cold War, 1945-1955:In Search of Summitry and Détente with the Kremlin

Günter Bischof, University of New Orleans

http://www.centeraustria.org/in-the-press/2006/12/4/winston-s-churchill-and-the-cold-war-1945-1955-in-search-of-summitry-and-dtente-with-the-kremlin.html

"ALCOHOL ABUSER" by MICHAEL RICHARDS

Any discussion of this subject absent John H. Mather MD, who has spent a decade researching Churchill's medical history, will be only that - a discussion. But here is a summary of what we know and why we know it.

Most historians reject the commonly held belief that Churchill was an abuser of alcohol. Perhaps "abuser" is a too broad a word. Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers, editor of the WSC-FDR correspondence and several erudite books on the two leaders, maintains that Churchill was not an alcoholic -"no alcoholic could drink that much!"- but "alcohol dependent," citing his occasional glass of hock with his breakfast(!) and his heavy imbibing at mealtimes. A doctor attending him after he was knocked down by a car New York in 1931, Otto C. Pickhardt, actually issued a medical note that Churchill's convalescence "necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at mealtimes," specifying 250 cc per day as the minimum (FH 101:51). Still, if he were truly dependent, it seems he would have had a hard time winning his 1936 bet with Rothermere that he could abstain from hard spirits for a year (FH 108:24) - which apparently he did.

The story of what his daughter calls the "Papa Cocktail" (a smidgen of Johnnie Walker covering the bottom of a tumbler, which was then filled with water and sipped throughout the morning), is confirmed by so many observers that it could hardly be untrue. WSC's observation that he learned this habit as a young man in India and South Africa (in My Early Life) appears to be literally true: the water being unfit to drink, one had to add whisky and, "by dint of careful application I learned to like it." The concoction he grew to like was, Jock Colville said, more akin to mouthwash than a highball. It barely qualifies as "scotch and water."

Where he did put away copious amounts of alcohol was at meals (see for example A.L. Rowse's description of his lunchtime visit to Chartwell, FH 81:9). Perhaps this was Churchill's secret to sobriety and health. (Dr. Mather, speaking in Boston recently, reported that WSC's blood pressure was 140/80 well into his eighties, asking his rather younger audience if they would mind numbers like those.) Churchill did not nurse a bottle, as an alcoholic would, and occasionally remarked to those who took whisky neat, "you are not likely to live a long life if you drink it like that," or words to that effect. Drinking at meals may be less deleterious than drinking at random, but in any case no colleague who can be taken seriously ever reports seeing Churchill the worse for drink. Thus WSC's famous quip, "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."

Judging the degree of his "dependence" is obfuscated by his own contradictory remarks. On the one hand he amused himself by allowing people to think he had a bottomless capacity. (There was his famous declaration to the King of Saudi Arabia that his absolute rule of life required drinking before, during and after meals.) At the same time in his writings you catch indications that he knew his limit: the drinking stories with the Russians were exaggerated, he wrote in The Second World War ("I was properly brought up"). Elsewhere he remarked, "my father taught me to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk." He remarked that a glass of Champagne lifts the spirits, sharpens the wits, but "a bottle produces the opposite effect." When encountered by Bessie Braddock MP with the famous "you're drunk" remark in 1946, his bodyguard, Ron Golding, was with him at the time, insisted that Churchill was not drunk, just tired and wobbly - hence his famous, devastating response. It would appear that his affinity to the bottle was at least partly a prop - like his cigars, which were often allowed to go out, rarely smoked beyond a third, and usually discarded after being well-chewed. Nevertheless he had a formidable capacity.’

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL Volume VIII: ''Never Despair,'' 1945-1965. By Martin Gilbert. Illustrated. 1,438 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. $40. CHURCHILL A Photographic Portrait. By Martin Gilbert. Illustrated. 374 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. $24.95.

''The day may dawn when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.''

From this quintessentially Churchillian rhetoric, addressed to the House of Commons by 80-year-old Winston S. Churchill five weeks before the resignation of his second prime ministry on April 5, 1955, comes the apt title of the eighth and final volume of the longest biography (9.2 million words) in the English language. As massive as the earlier volumes, this one has, like each of the others, a ''companion volume'' - though the companion this time is of the work as a whole, being a pictorial record of all of Churchill's life, whereas each of the others is a compilation, in two or three parts, of documents specifically relevant to the volume they accompany............

.............''Never Despair'' opens on the morning of May 9, 1945, the morrow of V-E Day, with the 70-year-old Churchill sleeping late in his bed at 10 Downing Street in London. It ends with the senile 90-year-old Churchill's death in late January 1965. The story the book has to tell, then, is a sad one over all - a story of decline and decay, of growing weakness and shrinking power, for Great Britain and for Churchill personally. Politically, there was defeat and retreat on virtually every front where Churchill had waged and continued to wage, to the extent he was still capable, the major battles of his public life. He, the very personification of the British Empire, who ''had not become His Majesty's first minister in order to preside over the dissolution of'' that Empire, was forced to watch and participate in precisely that grievous process. And as he did so, his great hope for the transformation of colonies into dominions, of Empire into Commonwealth, was drowned in a rising tide of third-world nationalism.

From India, from Egypt, from almost every far-flung British outpost, there was forced retreat. Mistaken British policy toward mandated Palestine, a policy Churchill opposed (he had been a Zionist since the 1917 signing of the Balfour Declaration), helped assure a bloody birth for the state of Israel and decades of Arab-Israeli strife; it also rendered virtually null and void Britain's influence in the Middle East. Suez, with its canal, was lost. Britain's governing capacity shrank to little more than the dimensions of the British Isles, and was even there reduced by the Irish Republic and by the rebellion against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Churchill strove to salvage all that it was possible to salvage of his country's national prestige and world influence through a calculated diminution of national sovereignty, a pooling of it in international organization. The top priority of his policy was the closest possible working alliance among the Western European democracies - a process he would facilitate by close creative partnership between Britain and the United States.

Within seven months after his 1946 ''Iron Curtain'' speech in Fulton, Mo. (the phrase originated, we learn in this volume, in a radio broadcast by the German Foreign Minister on May 2, 1945), he urged in Zurich the creation of ''a kind of United States of Europe,'' citing as a necessary ''first step . . . a partnership between France and Germany.'' His hope and belief were that Britain would then become ''the vital link,'' a decisive fulcrum of the balance of power, among the British Commonwealth, the European Union and the United States. Thereafter, for as long as he was able, he pursued the goal of a United Europe unceasingly, doing so with increased fervency after the atomic bomb ceased to be an American monopoly. Simultaneously he struggled for a rapprochement with Russia. Throughout his second prime ministry, his great object was a summit conference of Britain, the United States and Russia whence would issue the cold war's end and the scrapping of nuclear arms. It was the hope and prospect of this that caused him to hang onto governing power well beyond the time when it should have been handed over to his successor, Anthony Eden.

But the hope was frustrated, as we know, and the prospect grew dark. Churchill had some determining influence on United States foreign policy during the Truman Administration. At the press conference where the Marshall Plan was introduced, in June 1947, Gen. George C. Marshall said he was persuaded by Churchill's Zurich speech that the war-ravaged European states, with American financial aid, could work out their own economic salvation - and significant progress was then made toward European economic unity. But during Churchill's second prime ministry, simultaneous with the Eisenhower Administration, all his efforts toward an agreement with Russia foundered on Secretary of State Dulles's moralistic rigidities (how Churchill loathed ''that slab-faced bastard,'' John Foster Dulles!) and Eisenhower's appalling ineptitudes. The Americans stubbornly persisted in their view that atheistic Communism was a world-threatening evil with which negotiations were impossible.

Meanwhile, Churchill and his personal physician, Lord Moran, whose published diaries are here much quoted, faced the relentlessly advancing health problems of old age. Churchill suffered a mild stroke in 1953. Others followed. He grew deaf; he suffered memory lapses. And to his health problems were added worries over the health of his beloved wife, Clementine, who sometimes collapsed in nervous exhaustion and had to be hospitalized. (The great importance of Clementine to her husband's career is one of this biography's valuable revelations.) Yet the Winston Churchill who emerges from the morass of fact and extended quotation in this volume is very far from being, save during the very last few years, a pitiful figure or even a somber one. He radiates a vitalizing energy, the zest and gaiety of an inexhaustible joie de vivre. He is exciting to be with; his astonishing flow of wit amid eloquence is undiminished until he is well into his 80's. He has amazing resilience, awesome energy: he accomplishes far more between his 70th and 80th years than most successful men do in a lifetime. He loves and is loved greatly. Often he exasperates, sometimes he deeply hurts family and friends (he has bitter quarrels with Randolph and his actress daughter Sarah, is estranged from them for extended periods), yet is utterly devoted to them, as they are to him. He does indeed never despair.

Which is not to say he was never depressed. All his life he had suffered recurrent fits of deep depression (Black Dog, he called it) and these continued to occur. Months were required for recovery from the traumatic shock of 1945's general election, in which he was overwhelmingly voted out of office while negotiating with Stalin and Truman at Potsdam. During this dark period he was intensely irritable and irascible, quarreling even with Clementine. But he bounced back. Solaced by an abundance of whisky, champagne and cigars, he always bounced back, restoring and recreating himself through intensely active immersion in one or another of his varied interests - improving his country place Chartwell, oil painting (in his first extended holiday after the war he produced 15 large canvases in 25 days), horse racing and writing. Especially writing.

It was the writing of his six-volume ''Second World War'' that absorbed him following the 1945 election defeat - and the story of this project is here told in exhaustive anecdotal detail. (Some of it is amusing. For instance, an error in the first British printing of ''The Gathering Storm'' described the French Army as ''the poop of the French nation,'' a statement ''too near the truth'' to be let go.) It was the revision and readying for publication of his four-volume ''History of the English-Speaking Peoples'' (he was working on the final chapter on the night Hitler invaded Poland) that buoyed him following the trauma of his retirement at the age of 80.

In his writing as in his painting, Churchill, the great romantic of our materialistic age, employed broad strokes and vivid colors, as we all know - and he was as florid in private talk as in public speech. Queen Elizabeth II tells in this book of sailing up the Thames with him on the royal yacht: ''One saw this dirty commercial river . . . and he was describing it as the silver thread which runs through the history of Britain.'' A weapons expert tells of showing Churchill and Clementine, in 1952, a film of a guided missile shooting down an airplane, and of Churchill turning to his wife to say excitedly: ''Do you understand, my dear? This contraption . . . seeks out the enemy . . . and devoid of human aid encompasses his destruction!'' But what most astonishes is the extent to which he was able to impose his romantic vision on those who read or heard him - how, employing the language of Gibbon and Macaulay (and, to a lesser degree, Carlyle), with embellishments of his own, he managed in the direst of circumstances to restore meaning to such words as honor and glory and majesty while conceptually restoring the individual person once again to his place at the center of the universe, the ruler rather than the slave of the forces loosed by scientific technology.

Of the latter and their human and social consequences he was far more sharply aware than were most of the political leaders of his time. He strove to keep abreast of scientific advance through his close working association and friendship with the scientist Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell). And though he reacted vehemently against socialism as a way of humanizing technology, of harnessing it to human purposes (socialism was always and inevitably totalitarian, in his view), he was also, as a romantic conservative who valued individual freedom above all else, greatly worried about the effect technology was having, and would have, on the individual. Television was for him especially alarming. ''Being an old and old-fashioned animal,'' he wrote to a friend a few weeks after his retirement, ''I am no enthusiast for the TV age, in which I fear mass thought and action will be taken too much in charge of by machinery, both destructive and distracting.''

Of the companion volume, ''Churchill: A Photographic Portrait,'' one need say only that it is an interesting and valuable companion. Most of the more than 400 photographs Mr. Gilbert presents are new to this reader; they show Winston Churchill in every phase and mood of his long life, and they are accompanied by a commentary that is highly informative. The prose, here as elsewhere, would not, I think, have pleased its subject. ''While in Algiers,'' writes Mr. Gilbert, typically, ''Churchill finalised the plans for the invasion of Sicily and Italy.'' One can hear Churchill fuming that he had done no such thing, ''finalise'' being a bastard word he loathed only somewhat less than he did John Foster Dulles.

Churchill was indeed a noble spirit, sustained in his long life by a faith in the capacity of man to live in peace, to seek prosperity, and to ward off threats and dangers by his own exertions. His love of country, his sense of fair play, his hopes for the human race, were matched by formidable powers of work and thought, vision and foresight. His path had often been dogged by controversy, disappointment and abuse, but these had never deflected him from his sense of duty and his faith in the British people. . . . In the last years, when power passed, to be followed by extreme old age with all its infirmity and sadness, Churchill's children expressed to him in private the feelings which many of his fellow countrymen also felt. . . . From his daughter Mary had come words of . . . solace . . . when at last his life's great impulses were fading. ''In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father,'' she wrote, ''I owe you what every Englishman, woman & child does - Liberty itself.'' From ''Winston S. Churchill.'

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4D91338F930A15753C1A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Anecdotal dialogue

Though some of these have been reported in many accounts of Churchill no definitive source has yet been provided for these anecdotes.

Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if I were your wife, I'd poison your tea.

Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.

Variant: Nancy Astor: If I were your wife, Winston, I'd poison your coffee.

Churchill: And if you were my wife, I'd drink it.

Bessie Braddock: Sir, you are drunk.

Churchill: And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.

Variant: Winston Churchill: Madam, you are ugly

Elizabeth Braddock: Sir, you are drunk

Winston Churchill: Yes, but in the morning, I shall be sober.

Variant: Elizabeth Braddock: Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

Churchill: And you madam, are ugly. As for my condition, it will pass by the morning. You, however, will still be ugly.

Variant: Elizabeth Braddock: Mr. Churchill, this is a disgrace. You are quite drunk.

Churchill: This may be well and true, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

Young man (after seeing Churchill leave the bathroom without washing his hands): At Eton they taught us to wash our hands after using the toilet.

Churchill: At Harrow they taught us not to piss on our hands.

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?

Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course...

Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?

Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!

Churchill: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

(This is a very old joke where the participants vary dramatically from each telling. It's very unlikely though not impossible that the joke originated from Churchill.)

Unknown MP sitting behind Churchill on the back benches during his twilight years, to adjacent colleague, sotto voce: He's not what he used to be. They say he's gone senile.

Churchill, turning around to face them: And they say he has gone deaf as well!

Upon being told of the Lord Privy Seal's arrival at Chequers "Tell the privy seal, I am sealed to the privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time"

In the Urinals of the House of Commons, upon the entry of Clement Atlee, Churchill moves to the far end of the room,

Atlee: My dear Winston, I hope that despite being adversaries in the house, we could be Friends outside of it.

Churchill: Ah Clement, I have no quarrel with you, but in my experience, when you see somthing big, you tend to want to nationalize it!

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, February 4-11, 1945

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference 

Character and Leadership

(Note: This old chestnut was dropped through our letterbox so we are not sure if it is true or not, but it makes for an interesting argument.)

Q1: If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis; would you recommend that she have an abortion?

Read the next question before scrolling down to the answer of this one.

 Q2: It is time to elect the world leader, and your vote counts. Here are the facts about the three leading candidates:

Candidate A. Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists. He's had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks quite a few martinis a day.

Candidate B. He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a great deal of whisky every evening.

Candidate C. He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an occasional beer and hasn't had any extramarital affairs.

Which of these candidates would be your choice? Decide first.

Then, go to Site Map for the answer.

Esteemed Bahraini reader’s comment:  Heart of the matter stuff, congratulations. But what’s so new about all this? British military intelligence with the help of Ian Henderson were trying to turn everyone, from forest Mau Mau to detained leader, at this time – it was far less embarrassing than having to kill them.

Tembo: There are lessons all around, and perhaps no more so than in US presidential election on November 4; there is no dimunition of personal honour, nobility or integrity in acknowledging a better man or nation; there is only the exhaltation of striving to match their achievements, the next time around, and the next, for that is the essence of humility. And likewise, we had a duty of care; I believe for Churchill, for Africans, that was foremost.