Piers Brendon at Literary Review:
As Clementine Churchill famously remarked, her husband was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings.
Yet his position was not that simple, as Ted Powell demonstrates in this scholarly book. Churchill’s own family, beside which the Windsors were parvenus, had quasi-regal pretensions. He himself was born in a palace, the great honey-coloured monument to the victory which his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough had won at Blenheim. Churchill hero-worshipped Marlborough, trying to justify the traitorous part he played in ousting James II from the throne and claiming with characteristic hyperbole that Anne was ‘a great Queen championed by a great Constable’. And in his hagiography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston omitted to mention that, in defence of his family’s honour (during a complicated case of double adultery), Randolph had threatened to publish the Prince of Wales’s love letters, declaring, ‘I have the Crown of England in my pocket.’ On Edward’s becoming king in 1901, Winston wrote to his mother in less than awed tones, ‘Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews … Will he become desperately serious … Will the Keppel [his last mistress] be appointed 1st Lady of the Bedchamber?’
more here.
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Poetry is the expression of an eloquent, enlightened, and enlightening subjectivity. Every subjectivity is bedevilled with prejudices, good and bad. Sometimes it happens that the unhealthy prejudices are sophisticated and have tenacious roots (one thinks of T. S. Eliot’s antisemitism), sometimes they are cheap and irritating (Ezra Pound’s). Neither is a legitimate reason to excommunicate a poet or his work.
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