September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 16


Martin is a generous colleague. I first went to his home in London in 1992, after he sent me a warm letter about my manuscript for The Orders, Decorations and Medals of Sir Winston Churchill (1990, 2004). He then encouraged me to try something bigger (which became Winston Churchill Soldier in 2005) and made a gift to me of a copy of his Atlas of the First World War. He didn’t simply inscribe and present it; he tipped in a photocopy of Field Marshal Montgomery’s handwritten introduction. Martin not only read the manuscripts for both of my books and offered to do the maps for the soldier book, but also wrote a kind foreword to it.

My favorite anecdote during his review of the Soldier manuscript was when he called to advise that I had misspelled Gibraltar as “Gibralter.” In doing so he introduced me to a new term, “schoolboy howler.” A year later he sent me a newspaper clipping, a headline about Gibraltar.  He circled and highlighted the word and wrote on the page, “There’s GibraltAr for you!”
Hon Douglas S. Russell, Iowa City, Iowa

Ihave been reading Martin Gilbert for forty years and been his friend for fifteen of those years. He is a scholar in the grand sense of the word, a scholar of world history, of Jewish history, of the history of the english-speaking people, and, of course, of one of the greatest men of the english-speaking world, Winston Churchill. In his studies, especially his works about Sir Winston, I have come to believe that some of Churchill’s greatness rubbed off on Martin.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Editor-in-Chief,
The American Spectator, Washington

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