"We Shall Fight on the Beaches"
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"We Shall Fight on the Beaches"
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About this listen
In Part 2 of their "Great Speeches of History" miniseries, Nick and Sam explore a speech that rallied Great Britain — and the world — in its darkest hour: Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches." How did Shakespeare, poetry, and music influence this masterclass in rhetoric? What unusual practices did Churchill develop to overcome his speech impediments and lack of improvisational ability? And how did this quintessential wartime speech, which we hear in the British Bulldog's own voice, inspire Great Britain to defeat Nazi Germany and predict America's rise to global supremacy? All this, and more, as we discuss the speech that, as JFK later put it, "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."
Show notes:
Churchill, "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" (1940)
Churchill, "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric" (1897)
Extracted example of Winston Churchill speech draft
Churchill, Memories of the Second World War, 6 volumes (1948–53)
William Manchester and Paul Reid, The Last Lion, 3 volumes (1983-2012)
Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018)
Darkest Hour, film (2017), starring Gary Oldman
Credits: Vera Lynn's "White Cliffs of Dover" courtesy of SWLing.com on the Internet Archive.