Winston Churchill at Home

Also: Ross Douthat’s fantasy novel, the origin of music genres, the meaning of syntax, T.S. Eliot’s orthodoxy, and more.

Winston Churchill’s Chartwell. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! Richard Vinen reviews Katherine Carter’s Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm in the latest issue of The Literary Review:

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first visit to Winston Churchill’s country house at Chartwell in Kent. He described the house thus: ‘A wonderful place! Eighty-four acres of land … all clothed in a truly English dark-blue haze.’

Churchill had bought Chartwell in 1922 with the fruits of an inheritance. Much of the frenetic energy that he devoted over the next eighteen years to writing and journalism sprang from his need to pay for the house’s upkeep and for the generous entertaining that he undertook there.

It was during the 1930s that Chartwell mattered most. Churchill was out of office. He had a flat in London but no official residence and, for much of the time, no particular reason to be in the capital. Chartwell was not, though, a retreat from the world. It was a kind of factory, filled with secretaries and research assistants who hammered Churchill’s literary and political productions into shape. It was also a meeting place – close enough to London for people to come down for lunch, dinner or an evening of conspiracy.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. Read about it here, or just jump right in. The first third of the novel is free. The rest will be paywalled.

A history of anchovies: “Today the average Spaniard puts away six pounds of the things each year, but it was a different story in the sixteenth century, when the Catalan chef Ruperto de Nola complained that anchovies were ‘commonly bitter.’ A little later, the English physician Tobias Venner fumed that they ‘do nourish nothing at all, but a naughty cholerick blood.’”