Quote of the Day (Samuel Butler, on ‘True Inspiration’)

“Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.”—English novelist and critic Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Samuel Butler's Note-Books, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1952)

Verse of the Day (W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, on a Long-Kept Secret)

“At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.”— English-born American poet, critic and playwright W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1936)
 
Well, in the case of The Person Formerly Known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, that would be secrets, plural. And they are probably not all out, but so many have emerged about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that he has been stripped of his royal title and, as of last week, arrested on “suspicion of misconduct while in office.”
 
Before his (since terminated) marriage, this ex-royal enjoyed something of a reputation on Fleet Street of what might be called in the British Isles “a bit of a lad.” But nothing prepared the country for the firestorm surrounding e-mails and photos released from the Epstein files that further undermined Andrew’s disastrous attempt at damage control a few years ago.
 
Like Mark Twain, I have long believed that “the kingly office…is no more entitled to respect than the flag of a pirate.” But these days, I think that the British are doing far more to hold to account those in the highest positions of their country than we are here in the United States.
 
And that goes for the fellow here who would like to hold all power, with nobody to second-guess him. All his talk about the Epstein revelations having “exonerated” him only leaves most of us exasperated. If he’s really innocent, why not release the remaining 3 million documents?
 
(The image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor that accompanies this post was extracted from a photo of him with Juan Manuel Santos, President, Republic of Colombia. It was taken on Nov. 9, 2017, on the presentation of the Chatham House Prize, and was made available by Chatham House. Since then, Andrew’s title, along with his smile, has disappeared.)

Photo of the Day: The Calm Before the Snowstorm

Like so many New Jerseyites, I waited patiently for the 12-plus inches of snow from the storm in late January to melt away. In the past week, courtesy of higher temperatures and rain, it finally receded to a more manageable level.

Then came the news that four weeks to the day of that big storm, another, with maybe even more snow and higher winds, was going to hit.

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, then, when I drove out to Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, for the kind of walk I hadn’t been able to take in weeks. Despite large puddles in spots, many other area residents felt similarly and circled the large track on the field.

If anything heartened me as I thought of what was to come within 24 hours (and even as I type this, I can see the flakes following), it was that earlier this winter, the days would have been shorter and I wouldn’t have able to take the attached picture of the glorious late-afternoon sky—and that it might take less time for traces of this latest brutal storm to disappear.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Abraham Heschel, on How the Prophet Disdains ‘Conventional Lies’)

"The prophet is a person who suffers from a profound maladjustment to the spirit of society, with its conventional lies, with its concessions to man's weakness. Compromise is an attitude the prophet abhors. This seems to be the implication of his thinking: compromise has corrupted the human species. All elements within his soul are insurgent against indifference to aberration. The prophet’s maladaptation to his environment may be characterized as moral madness (as distinguished from madness in a psychological sense)." — Polish-born American Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel (1907-1972), The Prophets (1962)

Quote of the Day (Tom Robbins, on Being ‘Extremely Reverent’)

“I’m extremely reverent; it just depends what I’m looking at. From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.” —American novelist Tom Robbins (1932-2025), quoted by Rob Liguori, “ ‘I Don't Let It Snow on My Fiesta,’” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2014

This cropped image of Tom Robbins, in San Francisco at a reading sponsored by Booksmith, was taken on Sept. 24, 2005, by 48states (talk).

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ on What Worries the U.K. Government)

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington]: “Humphrey, I'm worried.”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne]: “Oh, what about, Prime Minister?”

Hacker: “About the Americans.”

Appleby: “Oh yes, well, we're all worried about the Americans.” — Yes, Prime Minister, Season 1, Episode 6, “A Victory for Democracy,” original air date Feb. 13, 1986, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

Forty years after this episode in this hilarious series aired, the British have even more to worry about their partner in the “special relationship” than they did back when it only concerned Americans going crazy about Communist subversion.

Now, the Prime Minister has so much more on his mind—like whether the current American President will destroy the transatlantic alliance, subvert representative governments around the globe, spark a trade war by ratcheting up tariffs, or use Royal Air Force bases for potential unilateral strikes on Iran.

Moreover, the Prime Minister and King Charles are sweating over what else the Americans have in the Epstein files—like whether they could make matters even worse, if possible, for the former Prince Andrew, and, with more revelations spilling out about additional cabinet ministers, whether the government of Keir Starmer could fall.

This Day in Film History (Death of Stanley Kramer, Postwar Liberal Producer-Director)

Feb. 19, 2001— Stanley Kramer, a director and producer who stirred audiences’ consciences with provocative sociopolitical content, died at age 87 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, Calif., from complications of pneumonia.

It had been more than two decades since Kramer had retired from the movie business, and more than three since his films had made money or even won critical acclaim. In the quarter century since his death, both conservatives and liberals, in agreement on little else, believe that he was as stodgy in technique as square in outlook.

But Kramer had a two-decade run in which he attracted major stars and made profitable movies with content that risk-averse, politically conservative studio executives regarded as radioactive. 

He might not have been the flashiest, most innovative director, but he was important for making Cold War America look in the mirror he held up to it on injustice at home.

Coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, hearing his mother extol her clerical job at Paramount Studios in Gotham, Kramer eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he got ground-up training in the film industry as a carpenter, screenwriter, editor, and producer before his rise was interrupted by a stint in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.

The fracturing of the studio system in the late 1940s opened the way for someone like Kramer who had, in effect, adopted guerrilla tactics in producing his early independent pictures, on the cheap and on the fly. Because of its sensitive subject, Kramer shot Home of the Brave (1949), generally considered the first movie on racism to be distributed by a Hollywood studio, in seventeen days in total secrecy under a different title.

A five-year contract he signed as an independent producer for Columbia Pictures in 1951 guaranteed a steadier financial base and higher budgets, but at the price of being second-guessed by studio head Harry Cohn, whom Kramer later described as “vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish and malevolent.”

High Noon, a taut western with a not-so-subtle message about the dangers of McCarthyism, represented perhaps his greatest triumph in this period while also damaging a friendship and giving him a reputation for having the courage of someone else’s convictions.

After his producing partner, screenwriter Carl Foreman, ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for refusing to “name names” of Communists he had known earlier in the industry, Kramer bought his share of the partnership, and would have totally erased his participation in the movie were it not for protests by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper.

A move into the director’s chair, Kramer felt, was a natural progression for him, considering how he had become so involved with all aspects of his films to date. 

But it took a couple of years before he hit his stride with The Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts forced to overcome their differences over race—a dramatic encapsulation of the conflict starting to rage in earnest in America during that time.

Over the next nine years, Kramer would delve into nuclear annihilation (On the Beach, 1959), evolution and church-state relations (Inherit the Wind, 1960), antisemitism (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, and Ship of Fools, 1965), greed (his atypical 1963 breakneck farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), and, most controversially, interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967, in the image accompanying this post).

What The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael lambasted as Kramer’s “irritatingly self-righteous” themes may have limited the director’s critical acceptance. But with his movies continuing to mint box-office gold, Hollywood congratulated him—and itself, for appreciating him—with the Irving Thalberg Award for overall excellence at the 1961 Oscars.

But after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer never had another success. A self-described New Deal Democrat, he fell out of step with youth that gravitated towards more radical “New Left” politics, telling film historian Donald Spoto that he had been “somewhat viciously attacked along the way for being part of a ‘do-good' era.”

I don’t think that audiences simply tired of Kramer’s politics or of his largely stationary camera. Many were driven to distraction by his earnestness, an outlook that naysayers found out of place in an age gone so stark, raving mad that it required movies with the kind of subversive style and substance of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

I question whether any Kramer-directed movie has served as fodder for film-school sessions on technique, but, by directing 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, he displayed a deft touch with often skittish professionals, and his influence runs stronger than many cynics care to admit:

*Aaron Sorkin’s penchant for courtroom drama (the scripts for A Few Good Men and The Trial of the Chicago Seven) and preachy politics (The West Wing) owes much to him.

*Quentin Tarantino has compared him to Oliver Stone, except that the controversial J.F.K. auteur was not a “clumsy filmmaker” like Kramer.

*And, with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer paved the way for Steven Spielberg’s searing Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List.

Today, the Producers Guild of America presents the Stanley Kramer Award to honor films that highlight significant social issues, including, for example, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Normal Heart, and Get Out.

Quote of the Day (Jesse Jackson, on Using American Influence in Northern Ireland)

“If legislation were passed supporting the MacBride Principles, as President I would sign it into law. Any President should.”—Democratic Presidential candidate and civil-rights advocate Jesse Jackson (1941-2026), quoted in “Simon-Jackson on Ireland,” The Irish People, Mar. 19, 1988

The many obituaries and career assessments of Jesse Jackson since the announcement of his death earlier this week have understandably focused on his impact as the most important African-American leader between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama.

But more broadly, he may have been the most radical major party candidate in American history since William Jennings Bryan. His concerns touched on not just the problems faced by this nation’s working class but those abroad.

Over the last decade, in writing (with Rob Polner) a biography of Paul O’Dwyer, An Irish Passion for Justice, I became fascinated with why this Irish-born New York radical lawyer, politician, and activist supported Jackson’s insurgent Presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.

Particularly since 1969, with the start of the sectarian “Troubles” that convulsed Northern Ireland, O’Dwyer had sought Democratic politicians aiming for national office who would aggressively press Great Britain for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

Rather than George McGovern, an antiwar liberal who might have normally won his endorsement, he ended up supporting Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Presidential primaries because, unlike the Senator from South Dakota, she took an unequivocal stance favoring Irish unification.

Additionally, in the U.S. at large as well as in New York State, O’Dwyer had long felt uncomfortable with the party’s lack of Black leadership. With Jackson’s ringing oratory on behalf of a “Rainbow Coalition” of white and Black voters motivated by economic unrest in the Reagan era, O’Dwyer saw a charismatic candidate who could break through.

To an extent not always understood by many who focus on particular countries, the struggle for civil rights has taken inspiration from around the world. Henry David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience profoundly shaped Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of passive resistance to British rule in India, which in turn influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the segregated American South.

In the late 1960s, civil-rights marches staged by Ulster Catholics drew on the non-violent protests of African-Americans under the leadership of Dr. King. 

And, as civil rights activism moved to a different spot on the globe in the Seventies and Eighties—South Africa—many Ulster nationalists and their American supporters glimpsed another, economic model with potential for exerting pressure on a recalcitrant regime: the Sullivan Principles.

In 1977, as a tool against apartheid, the Rev. Louis Sullivan of Philadelphia conceived non-discrimination guidelines that companies investing in South Africa should follow to ensure fair employment. 

Seven years later, the Irish National Caucus fashioned a similar cudgel against the “the systematic practice and endemic nature of anti-Catholic discrimination” in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland since partition in 1921, naming the MacBride Principles after Sean MacBride, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of Amnesty International.

These nondiscrimination and corporate codes appealed to O’Dwyer. Peter King, a conservative Long Island Republican who made common cause with the progressive Democrat on Ulster, remembered about his ally, in an interview with Rob and myself for our biography:

“Paul was really a lawyer at heart, and saw things through the vision of a lawyer. Even though he was in politics, and ran for office a number of times, he had that legal direction— how can this be done, how can the law be changed, how can we put certain protections in. Even in the frenzy of a political or nationalist moment, he was at his core a lawyer.”

Jackson, along with another 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Paul Simon, responded to a questionnaire from the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish Affairs, with the response above on the MacBride Principles.

A few weeks later, just before the Democratic Presidential primary in New York, O’Dwyer introduced Jackson to Irish politicians and lawyers at a fundraiser, extolling the candidate’s interracial vote-getting potential.

Though the party’s eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, had endorsed this corporate code of conduct as governor of Massachusetts, he did not discuss it much on the campaign trail after securing the nomination.

In any case, his failure at the polls that autumn meant that it would take another four years before O’Dwyer found, in Bill Clinton, a candidate willing to endorse the MacBride Principles and appoint a special envoy to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland.

With Jackson’s passing—and access to his papers and the recollections of friends and family members—the time is ripe for historians and biographers to investigate and weigh the legacy of this complicated but critically important American progressive. His advocacy on behalf of Northern Ireland should be a part of such research.

(The portrait of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson that accompanies this post was taken during the 1980s by Jesse Jackson for President, Inc.)

Quote of the Day (Katie Martin, on Bitcoin and the ‘Tech Wreck’)

“The shock to bitcoin is brutal for those who have placed their life savings in this thing. But the warning signs were there all along, and those who bought it anyway can reasonably be expected to have done so with their eyes open. Theirs is a pool of capital that has been placed in this unproductive belief system for too long. In this more sober market environment after the ‘tech wreck,’ now is the time for that money to do something more useful in the financial system.”— Market trend columnist Katie Martin, “The Long View: Bitcoin Blues and ‘Tech Wreck’ Signal a Fundamental Reset,” The Financial Times, Feb. 7-8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, of a bitcoin logo with digital enhancements, was taken on June 2, 2025, by Dmar198.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (The Prophet Joel, With a Thought for Lent)

“ ‘Yet even now,” says the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
     and rend your hearts and not your garments.’
Return to the Lord, your God,
    for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
    and repents of evil.”—Joel 2:12-13
 
The image of Joel accompanying this post is a detail from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ on an Institution No Longer Around)

[Walking with each other before delivering his State of the Union address]

Sydney Ellen Wade [played by Annette Bening]: “How'd you finally do it?”

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas]: “Do what?”

Sydney: “Manage to give a woman flowers and be president at the same time?”

Andrew: “Well, it turns out I've got a rose garden.”— The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

It’s funny how seeing a movie decades apart can make you look at it in completely different ways. Case in point: The American President, which I viewed shortly after it came out in November 1995 and again yesterday afternoon, at a special Presidents’ Day presentation at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ. (It featured an excellent introduction by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Pat Schuber on the evolving nature of the Presidency.)

When I heard the above exchange three decades ago, for instance, I groaned at lines so corny that even Frank Capra (such an obvious inspiration for the movie’s creators that he’s even referenced at one point) wouldn’t have served them up.

Yesterday, I groaned for a different reason: the Rose Garden that President Shepherd makes use of no longer exists, in the beloved form that Americans of both major political parties cherished. And all because of one man.

Years ago, I had decidedly mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, as I did in my few attempts to watch the TV show for which this film was, in effect, a dry run: The West Wing. It raised valid concerns about America’s polarized environment, the microscope under which modern Presidents exist, and the precious lack of personal privacy they enjoy.

But with its bad guys—all Republicans without a single redeeming ideological or social value—it created straw men that his heroes (liberal Democrats) could easily swat away. At least George Bernard Shaw, also given to long speeches in his plays, gave his devils their due, which made rebutting them all the more convincing.

Moreover, Sorkin's heroes possessed few complications, with their real-life inspirations bleached of their flaws when depicted in fictional form. In this film, as a centrist liberal facing a sex scandal promoted by the opposition, Shepherd had clear affinities with the President at the time, Bill Clinton.

Except for this fact: Clinton not only had to issue a false denial that only the most gullible believed about a past affair (with trashy entertainer Gennifer Flowers), but his campaign labored mightily to stamp out entire “bimbo eruptions,” while Shepherd was a lonely widower enchanted by a single intelligent, lovely environmental lobbyist.

Despite these shortcomings, time had raised my opinion of The American President from decidedly mixed to good, if not great. It was even better cast than I had recalled, with Samantha Mathis, John Mahoney and Wendie Malick in interesting supporting roles, and several lines and situations rang with unexpected prescience.

In his climactic speech, for example, Shepherd not only identified the divisive electoral strategy of his rival (an obvious Newt Gingrich stand-in), but the same one employed by the current Oval Office occupant for the last decade: “Whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

And, when Martin Sheen’s chief of staff A. J. MacInerney tells Michael J. Fox’s idealistic aide, “The President doesn't answer to you,” Fox could answer for today’s citizenry outraged by daily lies and civil liberty violations: “Oh, yes he does.…I'm a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it's our responsibility!”

Photo of the Day: Honest Abe’s Stovepipe Hat

Few objects are so associated with a single person as the stovepipe hat with Abraham Lincoln. This form of headgear was quite popular in the 19^th century, but, if you’re like me, you’re hard pressed to think of another wearer than America’s 16^th President.

I photographed the one you see here back in June 2021, while in Manchester, VT, for a beloved relative’s wedding. It’s part of the items on display in Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s oldest son.

Abe Lincoln wore several such hats in his lifetime, as soon as he was old enough to afford one in adulthood. It certainly afforded convenience (he took to carrying his paperwork in it as a young attorney), but I think it also made him look more imposing. 

Typically seven to eight inches tall, these hats, when topping his 6 ft.-4 in. frame, brought his total height to nearly seven feet tall, making him stand out as much as modern pro basketball centers.

Believe it or not, this hat—black and narrow-brimmed, made from glossy black pile textile that covers a paper card support—is only three of Lincoln’s still in existence. Evidently he bought it at Siger and Nichols, a firm then based on Maiden Lane in New York City.

There are plenty of reasons to visit Vermont, but if you find yourself in the southwestern corner of the state, you should make it a point to visit Hildene.

Robert Todd Lincoln was one of the more consequential offspring of American Presidents, serving variously as Secretary of War, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman railroad company.

But there is no doubt that all visitors to this 24-room Georgian revival mansion will want to view its historic exhibit associated with Robert’s father, which not only includes this hat but also an oval dressing mirror from the White House and a Bible owned by the President.

Abraham Lincoln’s words and actions still matter to America. But artifacts like this hat at Hildene also have their function: sort of like relics of a man who’s become known, in effect (and probably to his ironic amusement, could he see it), as America’s great secular saint.

Quote of the Day (Ron Chernow, on George Washington’s ‘One Major Blunder As President’)

“Washington committed only one major blunder as president: He failed to put his name on Mount Vernon and thereby bungled an early opportunity at branding. Clearly deficient in the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle for the lowly title of father of his country.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, “Ron Chernow Stands for Press Freedom at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” www.pen.org, April 30, 2019

This Day in British History (Birth of Brendan Bracken, Diehard Churchill Ally)

Feb. 15, 1901— Brendan Bracken—a mysterious figure who, despite being three decades younger than Winston Churchill, became his closest friend and Minister for Information in his wartime Cabinet—was born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland.

A lanky, bespectacled redhead with charm and energy to spare, Bracken was hard to miss in any assembly. But, if people had no trouble picking him out, they had plenty in figuring him out. 

Who was he? Where did he come from? How had he become so indispensable to Churchill? Why was there a break in their relationship for five years before Bracken re-committed himself to his mentor in the latter’s darkest political hours?

For a long time during his rise in business and politics, even the last part of that first sentence above—about Bracken’s date and place of birth—would have been murky. 

The truth was that Bracken’s father, a well-to-do builder and member of the Fenian brotherhood that sought Irish independence, died when Brendan was three and that his stepfather years later was likewise of republican sympathy.

But by his teens, Bracken was acting so wildly that his mother packed him off to a Jesuit boarding school in Dublin and, when that effort to curb him failed, even further, to a similar institution in Australia.

At age 18, with Ireland plunged into its war of independence from Britain, Bracken was back in Dublin. He embraced his mother’s Unionist sympathies but not her Catholic faith. In the next several years, he not only rejected his Irish identity but bewildered former and newfound acquaintances by denying he had one, passing himself off as Australian. 

At various times, he also changed his age when the circumstances were advantageous and claimed that a brother had died when actually, like all family members except his mother, Bracken was estranged from him.

In 1923, the most important event in his life occurred when he met Winston Churchill. That December he organized Churchill’s unsuccessful General Election race as a Liberal in Leicester West, then another, four months later, as an independent. Finally by the end of 2024, Churchill won a safe seat in a return to the Conservative Party he had abandoned 20 years before.

An astonishing rumor, fed as much by the pair’s close relationship as by the red hair they shared, was that Bracken was his chief’s illegitimate child. The aide not only didn’t deny it but, some suspect, may have even spread the gossip. 

Churchill’s wife Clementine, already fuming that her husband's newfound friend was sleeping in the house with his feet up on the sofa, demanded answers, only to be blithely assured by the great man, “I looked it up, but the dates don’t coincide.”  

Though the rumor was untrue, it's hard not to think of the two men as surrogate family members. Bracken was more responsible, even-tempered and helpful than Churchill's choleric and alcoholic son Randolph. And in Churchill, Bracken found something of a father figure, an affectionate presence who fully shared his Unionist, even imperial, sympathies.

With Churchill’s return to the House of Commons, their paths diverged for a time, with Bracken displaying a talent for finance and business management. He became a publishing mogul, becoming chairman of the Financial News in 1928 and, 17 years later, merging it into The Financial Times, making that paper with its distinct paper color the institution it remains.

This business acumen and journalistic influence became indispensable to Churchill by the end of the decade, when this lifelong politician struggled through the decade known as his “Wilderness Years,” the period when, his relentless ambitions stymied, he was without a Cabinet post, a mere back-bencher.

In 1929, having won election as a Conservative in the North Paddington seat, Bracken allied himself again with Churchill, becoming for the next 10 years a foul-weather friend who stood by him in his lowest political and financial moments.

It was bad enough that Churchill found himself out of step with Conservative leadership on Indian policy, King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis, and appeasement towards Nazi Germany. But his spendthrift habits put him continually in financial danger.

In 1938, press baron Max Beaverbook, disapproving of Churchill’s increasingly dire warnings about Adolf Hitler’s rearmament campaign, terminated his contract for writing an Evening Standard column. 

Without this desperately needed source of funds, a despondent Churchill made plans to sell Chartwell, the home into which he had poured so much of his money.

It was Bracken who came to his rescue by having his associate Sir Henry Strakosch buy Churchill’s American stocks at their original purchase price and pay him interest to boot.

Strakosch performed similar financial magic in 1940, as Churchill moved to the forefront of the movement to fight the Nazi war machine no matter the cost.

Had these arrangements been revealed at the time, they might have opened Churchill up to attempts to discredit his wartime efforts—as indeed has happened now from the American far right, with Darryl Cooper labeling Churchill “the “chief villain of the Second World War” in an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson.

Bracken was as instrumental in ensuring that Churchill finally became Prime Minister as he had been in keeping him from declaring bankruptcy. 

With Neville Chamberlain’s leadership fatally undermined by a closer-than-expected no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, Churchill told Bracken he was willing to serve under Chamberlain’s desired successor, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. 

Bracken got his friend to remain silent in the high-level meetings if Halifax were proposed to lead the new government. In the end, Halifax, saying it would be difficult to lead the war effort as a House of Lords member, left the field effectively open to Churchill.

In 1941, Churchill named Bracken his Minister of Information—in effect, in charge of wartime propaganda. Two authors distinctly unimpressed by what they learned about Bracken at close range in the war obliquely targeted him in their novels.

Evelyn Waugh told future biographer Christopher Sykes that Brideshead Revisited’s Rex Mottram was his only character fully drawn from life. Though he tried to disguise the source by making Mottram a Canadian, other details—notably, the character’s colonial origins, opportunism, overwhelming business success, and lack of devotion or even interest in Catholicism—pointed towards Bracken. 

And George Orwell was so incensed by the restrictions under which he labored in Bracken’s Ministry of Information, it was said, that he was inspired to create Big Brother in 1984, with the character’s kinship with the politico hinted at in their initials: B.B.

Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 General Election—in a campaign not helped by Bracken’s advocacy of an overly negative, partisan tone—left the two men out of power.

When Churchill returned to Downing Street six years later, Bracken announced that ill health precluded his continuation in politics. But he was not done serving his mentor and hero.

In June 1953, Bracken joined the Prime Minister’s inner circle in covering up the news of Churchill’s massive stroke, claiming only that the leader required “complete rest” for a while, ensuring that there would be no accurate UK coverage of the problem. 

It wasn’t until a year passed that Churchill, having made a great recovery in the meantime, gave even a hint of his health crisis.

By this time, the health of Bracken himself, a lifelong chain smoker, was in more serious danger. Upon hearing the news of the death of his stalwart friend in 1958 from lung cancer, Churchill lamented the loss of “poor, dear Brendan.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Henri Nouwen, on Why Jesus Calls for ‘No Ideologies To Be Imposed’)

“For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved." — Dutch-born Catholic priest, theologian, psychologist and writer Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), Peacework: Prayer, Resistance, Community (2005)

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, With a Thought for Valentine’s Day)

“How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’ outwears the accidents of life.”— Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)

Song Lyric of the Day (World Party, on ‘Avarice and Greed’)

“Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Or drowning in the oceans of history.”—“Ship of Fools,” written by Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger (1957-2024) and performed by World Party on their Private Revolution CD (1987)

I have to tell you that when it came to this song, I was late to the party—World Party, that is. Since I didn’t have access to MTV in the Eighties, I didn’t see the video for this tune, and the local rock station that I had listened to for more than a decade had become less experimental and more frozen in a classic rock format that downplayed more experimental newer music.

But once in a blue moon in recent years I would hear this on my car radio, and the other day I listened to it again, only this time it struck me with full force. Nearly four decades after its release, Karl Wallinger’s dystopian vision feels more relevant than ever.

“The world is in such a state,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard upon release of a new video. “The situation is getting crazy, isn’t it? It’s so ridiculous, this whole situation, mind-blowingly unintelligible.”

Any rational observer could only admit that it’s gotten worse. The “avarice and greed” that Wallinger scored, along with sexual corruption (“Sodom”), lie at the heart of the mushrooming Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And above all there is the specter of environmental catastrophe. Even the bipartisan agreement that once held sway on the necessity of saving outdoor spaces has vanished. As Stephen Lezac noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, with the rise of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump’s “inner circle consists almost exclusively of hyperonline MAGA ideologues, whose passion for American landscapes generally begins and ends at the golf course. The [Theodore] Roosevelt Republicans are in retreat. The indoor Republicans have arrived.”

Last year he worst of the tech tycoons, Elon Musk, severely hobbled the Environmental Protection Agency through his work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Just as predictably, his cuts to the Forest Service left it about 38 percent behind its recent pace for forest-thinning, prescribed fire and other work to remove potential wildfire fuel, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group.

“You will pay tomorrow,” Wallinger (who, sadly, died two years ago) promised the oblivious officers of the “Ship of Fools” of the Eighties. Sadly, today’s equivalent seems likely to capsize all of us in their tech Armageddon.

(The image accompanying this post, of World Party performing at The Basement in Columbus, Ohio, was taken on May 26, 2015, by Bob Mateljan.)

Joke of the Day (Fred Allen, on One Man’s Object of Affection)

“The last time I saw him, he was walking down Lover’s Lane, holding his own hand.”—Irish-American radio comedian Fred Allen (1894-1956), quoted by Ivan G. Shreve Jr., “ ‘If Frank Fay Were Acid, He Would Have Consumed Himself’ – Fred Allen,” Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blog, May 2, 2017

It’s said that when the Irish deliver an insult to someone they know well, it’s often a form of endearment. But such was not the case stateside when Fred Allen lobbed this verbal grenade at fellow Irish-American comic Frank Fay.

Fay certainly has a place in entertainment history as the actor who played gentle tippler Elwood P. Dowd in the original 1944 Broadway production of Harvey, and before that as the prototypical stand-up monologuist.

But even in show business, an industry with no shortage of egotists, Fay’s self-regard was thought far beyond the norm. And he was especially scorned as a philanderer and alcoholic who abused his first wife, the rising and highly admired Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck.

I try to source any quote used here on this blog, but I had a tougher time than usual doing so with this one. (There is a variation on it, by the way: the title of the post that Shreve wrote for his blog.) But I did see the quote used in the Madison State Journal back in October 1960, a year before Fay’s death at age 69, and from all that I have read there seems little doubt that Allen loathed Fay.

I thought of this quote as a rather cynical prelude to Valentine’s Day. No doubt there are many who, as Allen said, are more than happy to stroll down Lover’s Lane by themselves. I’m sure you can think of one such person. So can I. A hint: the right hand that fellow will be holding is probably smeared with heavy beige makeup meant to camouflage questions about why it looks so bruised all the time.

Quote of the Day (Lars-Erik Cederman, on Economics and Ethnic Nationalism)

“[E]thnic nationalism tends to attract the most support from those who have been disadvantaged by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. Populist demagogues have an easy time exploiting growing socioeconomic inequalities, especially those between states’ geographic centers and their peripheries, and they blame ethnically distinct immigrants or resident minorities. Part of the answer is to retool immigration policies so as to better integrate newcomers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to amp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hallowing out of welfare programs.”— Swiss-Swedish political scientist Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptations of Ethnic Politics,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019

The image of Lars-Erik Cederman that accompanies this post was taken on Nov. 1, 2018, by AliceRuth11.

Quote of the Day (Ginia Bellafante, on the Long-Term Decline of the Department Store)

“If you are in your 20s, department stores have been dying ostensibly for the whole of the time you have been conscious. ‘Lackluster upon lackluster,’ an analyst at Piper Jaffray described the sector in a New Yorker article in 2003 — seven years before Instagram ignited our scrolling addictions, 16 years before the closure of Henri Bendel, 17 before the end of Lord & Taylor and Barneys. The decline might be traced further back, sometime around 1989, when B. Altman shut down on Fifth Avenue. By then, Bloomingdale’s had been abandoned as an urbane meeting ground in romantic comedy (see ‘Manhattan’), replaced by The Sharper Image (see ‘When Harry Met Sally’).”— Fashion critic Ginia Bellafante, “Out of Step With Their Shoppers,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, looking north across 60th Street at Barneys New York on a cloudy afternoon, was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Jim.henderson.

In the mid-1990s, as part of a larger retail tour of New York, I visited Barneys, along with other members of my company and industry marketing researchers. Somebody noticed that my jacket, bought at a more downscale department store, looked an awful lot like one on the racks. It turned out that the merchandise we saw cost seven times more than what I had paid.

In his 2025 memoir, They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman depicts the company he managed with his brother Bob as the height of Nineties glamour. Maybe so.

But from that day nearly three decades ago, I became convinced that the store’s merchandise was overpriced. It was a far cry from the discount men’s suit shop his grandfather had founded. When I read the reports of its demise, I figured that pride goeth before a fall.

I was glad that, unlike many casual observers (and even some retail analysts who should have known better), Ginia Bellafonte’s article didn’t attribute the decline of the entire department store sector solely to the Internet.

A single cause is a convenient explanation for everything, but the department store has withered for several reasons, much like the enclosed malls they anchored for decades. I look forward to an entire book that will trace this devolution with the care it deserves.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on the Explosive Power of Books)

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”— American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

This Day in Film History (Birth of Ronald Colman, Sterling Star of Silent and Sound Eras)

Feb. 9, 1891— Ronald Colman, an Oscar-winning actor who personified courtliness from Hollywood’s silent to sound eras, was born in Richmond, England.

Probably because I was annoyed by what seemed like an unduly stiff performance as an amnesiac war casualty in Random Harvest (1942), I was put off for years by Colman. I changed my opinion after watching his world-weary diplomat in Frank Capra’s adaptation of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon (1937).

But it was his depiction of brilliant, alcoholic, self-sacrificing lawyer Sydney Carton in the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that finally convinced me that Colman was a sterling talent, well-deserving of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s best leading men of the 1930s and 1940s.

Understandably, the actor saw this as one of the best roles of his career. Not only did he agree to shave off his trademark mustache to play the part, but, with great good humor, he recited his climactic speech from the film whenever Jack Benny visited him on the comedian’s radio and TV shows.

After a half-century, I think I really should re-watch Random Harvest, which enjoys a reputation as one of the finest romantic melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Colman himself had been badly wounded in the Great War while serving in the London Scottish Regiment (a legendary unit in which actors Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall, and Claude Rains had their own harrowing experiences, as related in this 2015 post on the “Sister Celluloid” blog).

The war was as psychologically as physically devastating, as Colman recalled later:

“I won’t go into the war and all that it did to all of us. We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me. When I came back that was all I was good for: acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.”

Undoubtedly, it was Colman’s identification with the traumatized veteran in Random Harvest that helped him overcome an often far-fetched script—and win an Oscar nomination.

The war did not end Colman’s travails. Determined to appear on the New York stage, he initially encountered a long period of unemployment, to such an extent that he was reduced to scrounging for food. (“Figuring out the best way to spend five cents in an automat was an art at which I became adept. Doughnuts were the main standby.”) At last he broke through.

Colman found film to be the real where he would make his mark, however, when director Henry King cast him opposite Lillian Gish in the 1923 silent film The White Sister. The film was so successful that the trio reunited for Romola the following year.

Unlike many silent-film idols, Colman had no trouble adapting to sound. In fact, the new technology enhanced his career because he could take advantage of his distinctive voice: rich, cultured, mellifluous, enhancing his image as an English gentleman.

“Colman only really hit one note with it, a sort of wistful oboe note, but that note was enough if the writing of the picture suited his restrained lyricism,” wrote Dan Callahan in an October 2025 post on his “Stolen Holiday” blog.

No matter what genre he tried—western, melodrama, detective film, romantic comedy—Colman’s gentlemanly persona was tinged with melancholy, a trait of his off-screen temperament. That sense was reinforced early in his career because of a disastrous first marriage.

Colman wed Thelma Raye in haste in 1920, a union he came to rue as, stricken with jealousy at his increasing success, the actress took to stalking him. Increasingly withdrawn under this pressure, Colman was relieved when she sued him for divorce 14 years later. Fortunately his second marriage, to Benita Hume, was longer (20 years, until his death) and far happier.

To the greatest extent possible, Colman tried to live with discretion, so the public knew little of his private circumstances. What it saw onscreen, it loved. In addition to the films I mentioned previously, I also enjoyed him in The Talk of the Town (1942), a comedy in which his straitlaced lawyer risks his nomination to the Supreme Court by aiding an escaped convict whose innocence he comes to believe in.

With his fourth Oscar nomination in 1947 for A Double Life, Colman finally won formal recognition from his peers by winning the coveted statuette, as a Shakespearean actor whose latest role—the jealousy-maddened Othello—begins to mirror his own life.

(A recent biographer of Colman, the prolific Carl Rollyson, has a astute analysis of the actor’s “graceful, literate masculinity” in this Spring 2024 article for Humanities, a journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)