“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

January 16, 2018 6:35 PM

Blood, Sweat, Toil and Tears: Playing Churchill on Screen [The New York Times] “He fought with distinction and held almost every major office in Britain. He commanded a country in the midst of world war and is credited with inventing the social safety net. He has been called an imperialist and a warmonger. A drunk and a racist. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, rivaled only Shakespeare in his prolific literary output, and painted more than 500 pictures in his lifetime. And, some argue, he single-handedly saved civilization. Winston Churchill was a complex and contradictory leader unlike any in recent history. And he also presents one of the most sought-after and challenging roles for any actor worth his salt.”

• Winston Churchill’s black dog: portraying the ‘greatest Briton’ on screen [The Guardian]

“In the wake of John Lithgow’s magnificent performance in Netflix’s The Crown – a role written to imply some strong criticism of his 1950s leadership – two new Churchill films are coming out in 2017. Gary Oldman will star in Darkest Hour, set early in the second world war, due to be released in November. Footage has not yet been generally released, so it is too early to say what angle screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director Joe Wright will take. A picture of Oldman in costume shows a physical transformation as remarkable as when the same actor played a very different British figure, Sid Vicious, 31 years ago in Sid and Nancy. And Brian Cox will appear as the prime minister in D-day drama Churchill. I wrote the screenplay for the latter film. Our intent was to create an intimate portrait of a complicated, fascinating man. Though it may seem that these Churchill biopics coming at once reflect a historical moment, all of these projects were commissioned long before the 2016 referendum. Churchill is a perennial draw.”

• Andrew Roberts’s guide to Churchill on screen [The Spectator]

“‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice. The challenge in part was the physicality, because you’re playing someone whose silhouette is so iconic.’ We all have our own mind’s-eye view of what Churchill should look and sound like, and his personality was so strong and sui generis that it is almost impossible for an actor to impose himself on the role. He is therefore almost always left with either mere impersonation or caricature. Oldman avoided this in Darkest Hour through research. ‘I went to the newsreel,’ he says, ‘and what I discovered was a man who had this very athletic tread. He would skip around at 65 like a 30-year-old, he had a sparkle, the eyes were alive, he had a very sort of cherubic grin.’ This is an insight that a number of actors who play Churchill — who came to power in 1940 aged 65 — have missed, and who thus play him as a man in late middle age.”

• Can 'Darkest Hour' Avoid the Pitfalls That Have Plagued so Many Churchill Films? [The Weekly Standard]

“His largeness of soul, his capacious intellect, his legendary wit, his soaring oratory, and the length, breadth, and heated controversies of his long career—including many disasters, mistakes, and personal setbacks—are hard to render in the compressed format of feature films while retaining the profundity and substance of the man. Most films or TV shows about Churchill, or containing a significant Churchill role, are disappointing. There are a few exceptions, all of which owe their success to combining three related challenges in the right proportion. The first and most obvious is casting. The role has humbled some of the greatest actors of modern times such as Richard Burton, whose 1974 turn in The Gathering Storm is entirely forgettable. The question is freshly acute with the arrival of Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman in the starring role, which has become controversial even before its general theatrical release this week, and coming on the heels of two other Churchill depictions, last summer’s Churchill featuring Brian Cox in the title role, and the prominent inclusion of Churchill’s character in the Netflix series The Crown.”

• How to be Churchill [Evening Standard]

“In the most obvious ways, it could hardly be an easier thing to represent, depict or signify Churchill, for he has one of the most immediately recognisable appearances ever, outdoing even Charlie Chaplin. Nothing is simpler than to supply the pot belly and the stooped posture, the bald pate and down-turned mouth, the siren suit or formal three-piece with bow-tie, the flourished cigar, the homburg, the bow-wow growl. Advances in prosthetics mean that the babyish shape of the face can be readily replicated too. Yet the more that is made of these handy signifiers, the less Churchill comes to life. There is this difficulty: we have all seen so much documentary footage of Churchill that we know precisely how he looked (or at least appeared in public). The more a performance of Churchill draws our attention to these details, perversely, the more we are reminded that the actor is not actually the real thing, the more our very attention works against the suspension of disbelief. Churchill and the actor do not meld into a single being.”

• Winston Churchill was larger than life and a perfect character for movies and TV [Los Angeles Times]

“Eyes glaring, cigar aslant, Winston Churchill strode with fierceness through World War II, a leader of brash wit who sipped whiskey, wrote speeches in the bathtub and became one of the most towering and complex characters of the last century. He had a devouring intellect and a voice of gravel and grace. His radio broadcasts, as if a great uncle summoning his family, rallied Britain against German air raids and fear that Europe had tumbled into an inescapable abyss. He was a fusillade of energy and cunning, a man of controversy who with top hat, scowl and cane continues to be idealized, caricatured and immortalized in films and documentaries. "He's a ready-made character," said Paul Reid, who with William Manchester wrote the third volume of the Churchill biography "The Last Lion." "For scriptwriters he brings every device and trait to the table from youth to old age. He was transcendent and powerful, and many believed he saved Western civilization. Churchill gave you a potential movie every day. He won, he lost, he flip-flopped. He was a maverick and a malcontent."”

• From ‘The Crown’ to ‘Darkest Hour,’ Wealth of Churchill Projects Signals Hunger for Leadership [Variety]

“On the big and small screens — from Netflix’s hit series “The Crown” to the upcoming Oscar season entry “Darkest Hour” — Winston Churchill is having a moment. The sheer number of current projects focused on the man who proved to be one of the most stalwart leaders in history is particularly noteworthy given the political unrest and upheaval sweeping the globe. As the U.K. reels from last summer’s Brexit vote, as France regroups in the wake of an intensely polarized presidential runoff, and as President Trump courts controversy with every new pen stroke and tweet, film and television dramas have found inspiration in the individual who stood up to fascism when no one else would. It’s something actor John Lithgow, who stars as Churchill in “The Crown,” sees as a hunger for nobility in our leadership. “All these projects were underway long before the storm clouds gathered,” Lithgow says, “but we just seem to be at exactly the right distance from the Churchill moment to ruminate on his history, to look back and see how significant this was and how much you can learn from it.””

• Why the World Needs a Film Like Churchill Now [Vanity Fair]

“Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill is all about that: leadership, and the struggles, dilemmas, and triumphs that come with it. With an original screenplay written by British historian and author Alex von Tunzelmann, the movie stars British actor Brian Cox as the wartime chief. The action focuses on the intense hours leading up to D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the Allied forces invaded the beaches of Normandy—an operation upon which the entire war effort depended. Churchill’s wife Clementine, played by Miranda Richardson, is sympathetic to her beleaguered husband and an integral part of the operation. Her outfits, by costume designer Bart Cariss, are pure class. In addition, General Eisenhower (John Slattery), King George VI (James Purefoy), and war room secretary Helen (Ella Purnell) manifest the pressures of war and the hopes for victory, no matter their age or status. While today’s world is in a state of flux and the role of its traditional governors increasingly questioned, Churchill reminds us of the importance of courage and conviction—for leaders and followers alike.”

• Cultural depictions of Winston Churchill [Wikipedia]

posted by Fizz (39 comments total)

Ha!
vulnerable private moments of self-doubt
More so than in The Crown? If so, I'll be watching this just for that.
posted by unliteral 3 ¼ hours ago
posted by unliteral at 6:51 PM on January 16, 2018

The Real Winston Churchill: Churchill was no hero — he was a vile racist fanatical about violence and fiercely supportive of imperialism.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:53 PM on January 16, 2018 [25 favorites]

Excellent debrief, thanks, Fizz.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:55 PM on January 16, 2018

Of the more current Churchill portrayals, this is my ranking of the actors who have put on the hat:

1. Gary Oldman - Darkest Hour
2. John Lithgow - The Crown
3. Albert Finney - The Gathering Storm
4. Brian Cox - Churchill
posted by Fizz at 7:02 PM on January 16, 2018

he was a vile racist fanatical about violence and fiercely supportive of imperialism

and yet ...
posted by philip-random at 7:09 PM on January 16, 2018 [12 favorites]

I find Lithgow's approach interesting because he in some ways references the above articles, the idea of not becoming a caricature but of capturing, with the assistance of some good makeup and costuming, an attitude and the broad strokes of behaviour.
posted by Palindromedary at 7:10 PM on January 16, 2018

he was a vile racist fanatical about violence and fiercely supportive of imperialism

But enough about Gary Oldman...
posted by Sys Rq at 7:35 PM on January 16, 2018 [13 favorites]

As an Indian, all this hagiography is sickening.
posted by viramamunivar at 7:42 PM on January 16, 2018 [48 favorites]

Gary Oldman, oh he is my favorite actor, because he is so good at it, he made a great Smiley, evil space criminal, vampire, and now Churchill. Regardless of Churchill's thought crimes, at least we didn't all have to read Mein Kampf in school for the last four generations. I think it is time I read his Nobel Prize winning literature. I love British English out of great minds, it is sublime.
posted by Oyéah at 7:59 PM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]

We probably have Stalin more to thank for the whole "not reading Mein Kampf" thing than Churchill, if we're going to go there.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:05 PM on January 16, 2018 [13 favorites]

I disagree with Churchill on nearly every one of his policies, with the exception being his position on the Narzis.


That being said, how Gary Oldman's performance is getting any attention after John Lithgow's work in The Crown frankly defies me. Oldman should have got the Oscar in 2012 for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:10 PM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]

ARE YOU BLIND
THOSE ARE MY UNDERSECRETARY JAMMIES
I HAVEN'T WORN THOSE SINCE THE BOER WAR

Yeah, Gary Oldman is like Example #1 for why I try to maintain an Actor Filter. I like his Smiley better than Guinness's, even, but, ugh.
posted by praemunire at 8:12 PM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]

Well, Lithgow's done FDR too. So I think there's hope for a prestige-format period-piece hagiography starring that tall fella as Josef Dugashvili.
posted by mwhybark at 8:32 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

In "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend" news, I like that Churchill's mother apocryphally created my favorite drink.

I hate the racism.

I hate the imperialism.

I hate (as an American enamored with Australia and who may well one day find himself residing there) that he is chiefly responsible for the Gallipoli disaster.

And I really hate his plans for Operation Unthinkable at the end of WWII.

I like the killing nazis part, though. We could use a lot more of that these days. And I like, historically, that Britain considered him very much a wartime consiglieri to be ousted once peace had been achieved.

Complicated indeed.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:46 PM on January 16, 2018 [18 favorites]

rivaled only Shakespeare in his prolific literary output

Assuming they mean quantity, what about Leibniz? St. Augustine? Martin Luther? Hell, Stephen King?
posted by thelonius at 9:17 PM on January 16, 2018 [6 favorites]

they can't possibly mean that Churchill is the second greatest English writer, can they?
posted by thelonius at 9:59 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

What viramamunivar said. He considered the people of an entire country inferior and disposable. Vile, vile man.
posted by Nieshka at 10:00 PM on January 16, 2018 [10 favorites]

I think Churchill is a good illustration of the limits of ideology. I have no doubt that, in the same situation as Neville Chamberlain, I would have looked at the Nazis as just another cultural hurdle to get over. Let's not rush to judgement, let's keep the lines of communication open. Churchill, because of his bigotry, saw the Nazis for what they were, because not only was the first impression of them the accurate one, but their ideology is a response to and in direct opposition to liberal democracy. Their ideology is designed to make people like me fall for it. Conversely, Churchill could not hack a peacetime government where collaboration and the appearance of principles is paramount. His ideology stretches only to the circumstances where it works, and so does mine.
posted by Merus at 11:36 PM on January 16, 2018 [20 favorites]

As a Pole, I will only say I took great pleasure in discreetly stomping on his memorial stone in Westminster Abbey.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:56 PM on January 16, 2018 [9 favorites]

As an Indian, all this hagiography is sickening.

As a Pakistani this is something we can agree on.
posted by tavegyl at 1:56 AM on January 17, 2018 [14 favorites]

I'll never forgive Churchill for how he treated the Peaky Blinders.
posted by FelliniBlank at 2:35 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

There's also Anthony Lane's piece from the New Yorker.

If you are an actor of some eminence, naturally blessed with a mien like a full moon, it seems inevitable that, once you have attained the requisite age and girth, you will be asked to play Winston Churchill. Your obligation to do so lies somewhere between a contractual clause and a rite of passage, not unlike marrying Elizabeth Taylor in the nineteen-fifties.

Incidentally, this is the article that got me to finally track down and watch the Archers' "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp", which is a marvelous movie, and one that Churchill evidently took as something of a personal attack.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 3:04 AM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Churchill evidently took as something of a personal attack.

Citation, please.
posted by Mister Bijou at 3:36 AM on January 17, 2018

On the subject of on-screen portrayals of Churchill: given the antipathy toward him in the Subcontinent, have there been any Bollywood/Lollywood movies in which he has been played as the villain - and if so, who played the role, and how? Would a movie like Darkest Hour even get a release in India, Pakistan & Bangladesh?
posted by misteraitch at 4:21 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

From the Anthony Lane piece:

The hat. The jowls. The spotted bow tie. The spectacles, descending the bridge of the nose. The fat cigar, brandished like a broadsword. The waistcoat, the watch chain, and the whiskey.

It's a well-defined image, of course actors of a certain age want to take it up. A little too well-defined an image, really. Such a well-defined image, a portrayal of a portrayl, that it can only give strong credence to Stewart Lee's convincing argument about the historicity of Churchill:

It's sort of It's sad, isn't it? St George fought a dragon - that didn't happen, did it? Winston Churchill, there's not really any historical evidence for Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was a 1930s cigar marketing campaign that got out of hand. It was a pig in a hat. Proved so popular it eventually got elected. I actually made a documentary about it for Channel 5. It was originally entitled The Porcine Prime Minister, which I thought was quite good, yeah. But before broadcast, Channel 5 changed it to Churchill Was A Pig, Says Stewart Lee: Deal With It, Fuckers.
[...]
But you'll notice a cigar can be held between the cleft in the hoof of the pig. The other interesting thing here, you can see from it holding the cigar, is the trotters form that shape. It's the only gesture, the only political gesture that an animal with a cloven hoof can make. Well, what came first? The discovery that the pig could do that, or the existence of the V for Victory gesture? That was purely based upon the fact that we had a pig as Prime Minister.

(Sadly that clip from Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (featuring Alan Moore) is no longer on youtube but the transcript is up on Springfield! Springfield!)
posted by ocular shenanigans at 4:28 AM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Citation, please.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:36 AM on January 17 [+] [!]

Mister Bijou, if you read the Anthony Lane article, he goes into that in some depth.

Certainly, “Colonel Blimp” presents no detriment to morale. Indeed, the gist of the plot is that the future and the defeat of Hitler lie squarely in the hands of modern soldiery. Did Churchill fear that viewers might see in this fuchsia-faced, harrumphing old grump a trace of their determined leader, his jaw jutting out like the prow of a dreadnought? Did he maybe see that trace himself? “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid,” he declared in “My Early Life,” in an outburst of pure Blimpery. He added, “In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.” He and Wynne-Candy even attended the same boarding school, Harrow. In other words, Powell and Pressburger had conjured a fictional life that veered perilously close to Churchill’s, as dense with derring-do, divisiveness, emotional extremes, and lurching reversals of fortune as his had been. By showing the ages of Blimp, they made the Churchill film that never was. And what they omitted, perhaps to his dismay, was his extraordinary late bloom. That would be more than enough to hurt the Prime Minister’s pride.

posted by McCoy Pauley at 4:28 AM on January 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

He committed far more than thought crimes. The way he is lauded is disgusting. That he is so often defended and rehabilitated... I wish it mystified me but it's just more run-of-the-mill white supremacy, afaic.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 4:58 AM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

I've been trying and failing to find a way of seeing Bengal Shadows, a recent Indian documentary about the Bengal famine that killed millions in 1943 while Churchill diverted grain and other resources ostensibly for the war effort, but possibly just for contingency reserves for post-war reconstruction. It's a terrifying story, and not easy to research; in The Prime Minister And The Prof on the Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell puts a lot of the responsibility on the relationship Churchill had with Lindemann, his chief scientific advisor and closest confidant, and a very rum cove indeed.

(The film appears to have had a couple of showings last year in Paris and London, but there are no upcoming screenings and it doesn't seem to be available for streaming or purchase.)
posted by Devonian at 5:43 AM on January 17, 2018 [7 favorites]

One thing that I find fascinating about the way that Churchill is portrayed on film/television is that we're most often presented with the War-time version of Churchill. Especially within the last few years, we've seen this resurgence of Churchill adaptations that focus on this one part in the war. His patriotism, his eloquent and bombastic speech-making. We see him yell at his fellow politicians, smoke cigars, drink a lot of booze. He's very much a cartoon. We only see this one side of him.

As a result of this, it glosses over the many problems of Churchill that have been raised by Historians and the issues that the comments up above reference. A racist, bully, war-monger, fanatical supporter of empire/imperialism, they're all disturbing and should be closely critiqued.

Darkest Hour does shine a bit of light on his boorish and drunken behaviour, but it feels more like a quaint and beloved character trait and less a criticism. We're still left with this rousing speech at the end of the film and it's obvious what we're to take away from this film.

Behold the grandeur of this elder statesman during wartime! /s

Ugh.
posted by Fizz at 6:59 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Oh and infini has shared a very informative and critical look at Churchill and his involvement with the Bengal famine, a wonderful post to balance out this one.
posted by Fizz at 7:01 AM on January 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

reading all this (most of which I already knew), it occurs to me that what the world really needs is a full-on Winston Churchill bio-mini-series, but only if Martin Scorcese is involved. Because he's never been shy to show the beast in the heart of a "hero". I suppose it helps in this regard if you've got some solid Roman Catholicism in your upbringing -- we're all raging bulls deep down inside.
posted by philip-random at 9:50 AM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

reading all this (most of which I already knew), it occurs to me that what the world really needs is a full-on Winston Churchill bio-mini-series, but only if Martin Scorcese is involved. Because he's never been shy to show the beast in the heart of a "hero".

Wouldn't mind one about Mrs. Churchill .
posted by Fizz at 10:22 AM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Hans Morgenthau observes in Politics Among Nations that there's no necessary correlation between the personal motives of a leader and the success or failure of their foreign policy. He cites Chamberlain and Churchill as an example:

We cannot conclude from the good intentions of a statesman that his foreign policies will be either morally praiseworthy or politically successful. Judging his motives, we can say that he will not intentionally pursue policies that are morally wrong, but we can say nothing about the probability of their success. If we want to know the moral and political qualities of his actions, we must know them, not his motives. How often have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?

Neville Chamberlain's politics of appeasement were, as far as we can judge, inspired by good motives; he was probably less motivated by considerations of personal power than were many other British prime ministers, and he sought to preserve peace and to assure the happiness of all concerned. Yet his policies helped to make the Second World War inevitable, and to bring untold miseries to millions of men. Sir Winston Churchill's motives, on the other hand, were much less universal in scope and much more narrowly directed toward personal and national power, yet the foreign policies that sprang from these inferior motives were certainly superior in moral and political quality to those pursued by his predecessor. Judged by his motives, Robespierre was one of the most virtuous men who ever lived. Yet it was the utopian radicalism of that very virtue that made him kill those less virtuous than himself, brought him to the scaffold, and destroyed the revolution of which he was a leader.

I think it makes sense to regard Churchill as both a hero for his leadership during World War II, and a villain for his indifference to the Bengal Famine. For a detailed discussion of Churchill's role in the Bengal Famine, see Joseph Lelyveld's review of Madhusree Mukerjee's Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II.
posted by russilwvong at 10:27 AM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sorry, I didn't realize that the Lelyveld review is behind a subscriber wall.

Sometimes Mukerjee has to press down hard to force the pieces of her jigsaw into spaces where they don’t easily fit; but in offering a contrasting, if not an alternative narrative, she highlights limitations in the one with which most of us grew up. If the deaths of three million Bengalis can be seen as an unfortunate byproduct of hard choices made by well-intentioned, reasonable men in wartime, then we’re also confronted with a horror that deserves to rank with the bombings of Dresden and Nagasaki.

That is what Mukerjee comes close to accomplishing in her wrenching summary of the sufferings of actual victims: mothers who put their children up for sale, then their own bodies, as starvation loomed. She writes of packs of dogs loping through ravaged villages preying on infants, the enfeebled, and the aged while they still breathed. “Despite the horrific ways in which they met their ends, those Bengalis who perished of hunger in the villages did so in obscurity,” she says, “all but unnoticed by the national and international press.”

... What [British] officials faced was not a shortage of food but an economic blowout, a breakdown of price and wage mechanisms that made ordinary commerce possible. The point of emergency wheat shipments would have been to enable direct relief to the starving, which, even without imports, would have been possible earlier if the British had understood what they were facing and if they had sufficiently cared.

... “No matter how famine is caused,” [Amartya] Sen wrote in Poverty and Famines, “methods of breaking it call for a large supply of food in the public distribution system.” Put another way, the failure and callousness of colonial administration were the best arguments for emergency relief, but they were arguments the colonial authorities didn’t want to make to the war cabinet; and the war cabinet, headed by a die-hard imperialist, didn’t want to hear them.

There's a subsequent exchange of letters.
posted by russilwvong at 10:45 AM on January 17, 2018

This is damning with faint praise, but I've read a number of Parliamentary speeches by senior British politicians from that period, and Churchill is probably less racist than most. Britain's whole imperial enterprise was necessarily a bloody, racial endeavour and, at least at the higher levels, there were simply no good guys. Even the best of them divided the people under their control into "races" who were to be played off against each other or moved around the map to accommodate Imperial aims. The cure for this wasn't the rise of sympathetic imperialists: it was the fall of the British empire. Sadly, we're still living with the consequences.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:00 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is damning with faint praise, but I've read a number of Parliamentary speeches by senior British politicians from that period, and Churchill is probably less racist than most. Britain's whole imperial enterprise was necessarily a bloody, racial endeavour and, at least at the higher levels, there were simply no good guys.

The problem with Churchill is not that he was more racist than others or was more directly responsible for famine than others. The problem is that he is presented as a great British hero whose faults are often dismissed as 'awww, British bulldog'. Britain is very, very far from grappling with its imperial past, with 'but... the railways!' or 'we were better than King Leopold' as decisive conversation-enders for much discussion.

It's ok to have flawed heroes, and whilst I'm not British myself I recognise that Churchill's role in World War II was an important one. But his flaws and bad decisions were not limited to a lovable orneriness that somehow came to exemplify British grit, and his positives do not eclipse the negatives (or vice versa). For the billion odd people in the subcontinent and elsewhere, it's a travesty to ignore them, but the image of Churchill in British and American popular consciousness certainly does ignore or at least downplay them.
posted by tavegyl at 6:35 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Britain really needs to wake up to the impact of ignorance and lack of proper curriculum. They send their FCO peeps out to the wide world and wonder then why their piddly low income job offers are rejected out of hand. Like I said to one of them "why on earth did my Grandma go to jail if all it was for was for me to work for you?"
posted by infini at 2:53 AM on January 18, 2018

fwiw, Amartya Sen is from Bengal. The one that existed before the British drew the line down the middle of it to make the nation of East Pakistan, and subsequently as is the norm with their little lines, through the 1971 war that gave birth to Bangladesh.

He understands famines and economic development in his very bones.
posted by infini at 2:56 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

The errors and omissions of Winston Churchill film Darkest Hour.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:35 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]