Friday, May 26, 2017

First Paragraph

On December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party's government, stepped out of a taxi on New York's Fifth Avenue. He was in New York to begin a speaking tour in an attempt to recover some of the small fortune he had lost in the stock market crash two years earlier. Being English, and perhaps distracted by his troubles, he looked the wrong way down the avenue, and did not see the automobile that, traveling at about thirty miles per hour, knocked him to the pavement and dragged him for a spell, cracking some ribs and slashing open his scalp. Had he died, he would be remembered today by a few historians specializing in early twentieth-century British history. But he did survive. His name was Winston Churchill.

- From Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks

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