Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wants to remind all of his loyal minions that today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of your Maximum Leader's great hero. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born this day (St. Andrew's Day in fact - St. Andrew the patron saint of Scotland) in 1874 at Blenheim Palace.

Churchill's life is one of the most interesting lives of modern times. It is filled with glorious triumphs and equally disastrous failures. But through it all Churchill "kept buggering on."

Your Maximum Leader shudders to think where this world would be today were it not for Churchill taking the wheel of the ship of state in Britain in World War Two. For those who would dismiss Churchill's role in keeping Britain in the war, your Maximum Leader will commend to you John Lukac's fantastic book "Five Days in London: May 1940."

Inside the front door to the nave at Westminster Abbey there is a plaque on the floor a few feet from the poppy-lined memorial plaque dedicated to Britain's war dead of the Great War. The plaque reads "Remember Winston Churchill."

And we all should today.

Carry on.

Update: Your Maximum Leader thought it incumbent on him to beef up this post and make it worth of the great man.

If you've never been, visit the site of the Churchill Centre. It is a great resource.

If you are into the faddish (if that is a word derived from fad) trend of short biographies, then you want to read John Keegan's Churchill biography he wrote for the Penguin Lives series. It is the best short biography of Churchill.

If you want to "get a feel" for Churchill and don't want to commit yourself to the 208 pages of the Keegan work... Well if you can't bring yourself to read 208 pages you need help. But in case you need help and want to "get a feel" for Churchill; go to your public libarary (or Borders Book Shop) and get William Manchester's "The Last Lion: Alone." Then sit down and read the first 30-odd pages of the book. The chapter is entitled, "Chartwell, 1932." It is worth your time.

If you are visually stimulated and want to see a great depection of Churchill on film. Rent (or better yet - buy) "The Gathering Storm" with Albert Finney. The bit about Ralph Wigram may be a bit over dramatised, but it is a movie.

Of course, if you are a true Churchill fan (like your Maximum Leader) you need to read the works of the great man himself. Any of them will do. (He did win a Nobel Prize for Literature afterall.) Don't read an edited work containing bits of speeches, articles, and sundries. Get his 6 volumes on World War Two. Or his 4 volumes on World War One. Read those.

Or listen to Churchill's wartime speeches.

In closing, you should do something to remember the man whom your Maximum Leader thinks is the seminal figure in the 20th Century, and without whom we would be living in a world made dark by the perversions of Nazism.

Carry on.