Now available:
Winston Churchill – Prophet of Woe
Again and again Winston Churchill warned his country of dangers: The ambitions of Emperor Wilhelm II before the First World War, in 1914 he predicted the slaughter of trench warfare, in 1919 the threat of Boshevism, and in the ‘30s the evil plans of Hitler. His messages were not well received, and until 1940 he was generally considered to be an unpredictable and ambitious politician.
His leadership during the Second World War has now placed him in history as one of the greatest Statesmen and War Leaders of all time.
I will cover a period of nearly 100 years, beginning with the glory days of the British Empire under Queen Victoria, and ending, two World Wars later, with the dissolution of the British Empire. Churchill the politician played an active, and sometimes crucial role in this dramatic era. He was also soldier, adventurer and painter, and he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1953. He was known for his humour, sharp criticisms, impulsiveness, meddling, and let's not forget his occasional blunders.
The following subjects have been well received and have been available since 2008. The duration of the talk can be adapted to your requirements.
The Shakespeare Conspiracy.In 2007 Sir Derek Jacobi, the famous Shakespearian actor, announced his conviction that the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the writer of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon. This re-opened the controversy surrounding the authorship debate which rages for more than 150 years. The Earl of Oxford was the highest in rank in the English nobility during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Twenty years after his death his daughters published his plays (the “First Folio”) under a false name to avoid a family scandal. The plays contain hilarious and vindictive caricatures of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers. Lord Oxford as entertainer and as critic of the Elizabethan Era is illustrated by extensive use of DVD clips from the plays.
Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave will feature in a film about Lord Oxford as Shakespeare! Title "Anonymous"
See www.imdb.com/title/tt1521197/
Or google: film anonymous jacobi
Lenin – the German mercenary, and the Anastasia controversy. Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, found after the Second World War, clearly show that in 1917 Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were sponsored by massive German funding in order to bring about a violent revolution which would remove Russia from the war. In March 1918 a shameful peace treaty was signed between Germany and the Bolshevik rulers, allowing about a million German soldiers to be transferred to the western front. In my talk I will give an overview of the state of the Russian Empire under the Romanovs, followed by the dramatic sequence of events which resulted in the Bolshevik revolution and the first Communist Totalitarian State. Without any legal process the Tsar, his family, and many Romanov relations were massacred in 1918. A young woman rescued from a canal in Berlin in 1920 after an attempted suicide, claimed until her death in 1984 that she was Anastasia, the Tzar's daughter, a survivor of the massacre. The controversy surrounding her claims continues to feature in recent press releases and publications. I will present my convictions on this very complex topic, and show that events in 1917 are the key to this puzzle.
Dmitri Shostakovich - the composer who survived Stalin Shostakovich, while still alive, was considered to be a communist faithful to Stalin and the Soviet Union. A few years after his death in 1974 Solomon Volkov, in his book “Testimony”, showed through quotations from discussions with the composer in his last years, that he was extremely critical of Stalin and the communist regime, and over a period of more than twenty years was in constant fear of arrest and “disappearing”. While initial reactions to Volkov’s revelations were disbelief, even in the West, his views are now generally accepted. In my talk I will describe the bizarre artistic world of Shostakovich under Stalin’s terror regime, and how it affected him and his music. Shostakovich twice had a serious conflict with Stalin, but he survived to continue composing for twenty years after Stalin’s death. During my talk I will present many extracts from CDs and DVDs of his compositions for opera, film and symphony orchestra.
Available from February 2011:
Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands Sting.
Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister was a political phenomenon. The leader of a "Right Wing Revolution", she tackled the power of the Trade Unions, in particular the mineworkers under Arthur Scargill. She sometimes tyrannized her ministers. The strength of her position was largely due to her leadership during the short but very intense war to recover the Falkland Islands after an invasion by Argentina. I will describe the war itself, and then discuss suspicions that the war was actually a welcome opportunity to undermine the Argentinean military junta. The invasion was not a surprise to the British Foreign Ministry and Intelligence Services — could this have been a "Sting" operation? I will show that the victory of the British armed forces in reclaiming the Islands was a very close call.
