Word: beaverbrook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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H.R.L. was no press lord in the tradition of Britain's Lord Beaverbrook or America's William Randolph Hearst. Power was not his passion-what burned in him was the search for truth and the desire to communicate it. And the way he went about it was to hire the best men he could and engage them in what amounted to a continuous dialogue. The degree of autonomy he gave his editors and the interplay of ideas he encouraged was a constant source of amazement to any outsider who encountered it. The late Aga Khan once offered Luce...
...disillusioned to remain on the Guardian, Muggeridge joined Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard, started turning out truculent copy attacking all kinds of ideologies. When World War II broke out, he was recruited for the intelligence service and sent as an undercover agent to Mozambique. "It was a hilarious experience," he recalls. "The Germans and we were bribing the same Portuguese and sleeping with the same girls." Though he was decorated for his activities, he lost all taste for espionage. "In war it is permissible," he says. "But in peacetime it's a sick trade, a surefire road...
Theirs was an odd marriage. While Harold was going everywhere-meeting here with Duff Cooper, there with Lord Beaverbrook, growling at Churchill for failing to muster sufficient opposition to Hitler-Vita remained secluded at Sissinghurst, the Tudor castle they had bought in Kent. She was a strangely masculine woman who wore breeches and gaiters in winter and linen slacks in summer, and who often said that her one enduring regret was that she was not born a boy. Still, Vita was enchantingly feminine where Harold was concerned. Her letters to him were filled with tenderness, as were...
...Beaver, who himself was a compulsive intriguer, never quite made clear. His case that Edward was the victim of some sinister plot is weakened because the author makes obvious that he was also using the memoir to carry on a vendetta against some of his own enemies. Besides Baldwin, Beaverbrook was particularly harsh on Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times of London, which vigorously opposed the marriage. On a couple of occasions, the editor of Beaverbrook's manuscript, Historian A.J.P. Taylor, drops a footnote of gentle correction when the charges become too outrageous...
What Wally Wanted. Beaverbrook is at his sprightly and informative best when he sticks to a straight narrative of the events that eventually led to the abdication. He felt, as did most other insiders, that Edward made his greatest strategic blunder when he stated in November that unless Baldwin and his government approved a morganatic marriage with Mrs. Simpson, he would not go through with his coronation in May. Both Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill advised him to put aside his marriage plans until after the coronation, and then press his demands with the power of the throne behind him. Edward...