After more than 2,900 words earlier in the week, I don’t have much to add to the “Was Churchill Actually a Baddie?” debate. But if you want more, our friend Niall Ferguson’s essay “The Return of Anti-History” in the Free Press is worth your time.

That said, this afternoon I was leafing through my copy of Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, published in 1948 and the first of his six-volume The Second World War, when I rediscovered the following at the front of the book, directly after the author’s acknowledgments:

Theme of the Volume: How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm. 

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Winston Spencer Churchill, a man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and penned three or four of the greatest speeches ever written, could say in 21 words what it took me 2,900 to say.