QUOTES by Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.  

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.  No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.  http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Sir_Winston_Churchill/21

Howard Fast (1914-2003) was one of the 20th century's busiest writers, turning out more than 80 books — plus short stories, journalism, screenplays and poetry — in a career that began in the early 1930's.  His output was slowed but not entirely interrupted by the blacklisting he endured in the 1950's after it became known that he had been a member of the Communist Party and then refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He served three months in a federal prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress, a charge arising from his refusal to produce the records of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.  Mr. Fast joined the party in 1943, a decision he often said was made at least in part because of the poverty he experienced as a child growing up in Upper Manhattan.  He left the party in 1956, disillusioned by the Soviet Union's own stunning revelations of Stalin's terror and the spread of anti-Semitism there.  During those years, Mr. Fast won the Stalin International Peace Prize and "Spartacus," about a slave revolt in ancient Rome, was published.  Because of the blacklist, the manuscript went from publisher to publisher without success.  Finally, a Doubleday executive said that Mr. Fast should publish it himself but that Doubleday would order 600 copies for its bookstores.  It became a best seller.  The stigma of the blacklist gradually faded after Mr. Fast's repudiation of Communism.  "Spartacus" was reprinted as a paperback and in 1960 was made into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas.  Many other successful novels followed, including "April Morning" (1961) and a best-selling multigenerational saga of the Lavette family that began with "The Immigrants" (1977) and included "Second Generation" (1978), "The Establishment" (1979) and "The Legacy" (1981).  Mr. Fast also wrote a popular series of detective stories under the name E. V. Cunningham.  His hero was a nisei detective, Masao Masuto, a member of the Beverly Hills police force.  Masuto was a Zen Buddhist, and Mr. Fast himself was very much involved in Zen, "as a form of meditation and a very nice way of looking at the world," as he put it.  Mervyn Rothstein  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/obituaries/13FAST.html

Howard Fast's amnesia thriller Fallen Angel was originally published as by ‘Walter Ericson’ and later retitled Mirage as a tie-in to the 1965 film adaptation.  http://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/mirage-1952-by-howard-fast/

According to his memoir Being Red (1990), he decided to present Fallen Angel under a pseudonym because in those years of Red Menace paranoia he was afraid publishers would soon be boycotting all books by openly Marxist writers like himself.   J. Edgar Hoover himself called the CEO of Little Brown with the  message that it was okay for the book to appear under Fast’s own name but that the house would be in trouble if it came out under a pseudonym.  With the book already printed and bound, the dust jacket copy was hastily revised to announce that Ericson was Fast’s newly minted byline for mystery fiction.  http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=15682

The Louvre is preparing to reopen its 18th-century galleries on 6 June 2014, after nearly a decade of renovation work.  The old rooms did not meet with security standards and the installation, “stylish in the 1960s, was out-dated”, says Jannic Durand, the head of the museum’s decorative arts department.  The galleries closed in 2005 and renovation work began in late 2011 with a €26m budget, funded entirely by private groups including the Louvre Atlanta project, a collaboration with the High Museum of Art, and individual donors.  The museum created the “Cercle Cressent” (named after Charles Cressent, an 18th-century master cabinetmaker), specifically for the project, bringing together collectors and patrons, led by Maryvonne Pinault, the wife of the collector François.  Comprising 35 rooms that display more than 2,000 objects from the collection, the galleries are laid out on the first floor of the north wing of the Louvre’s Cour carrée (square courtyard).  The rooms are divided into three main chronological periods—the Regency style of Louis XIV’s reign (1660-1725), the height of the Rococo style (1725-55) and the return to Classicism under Louis XVI (1755-90).  Francine Guillou and Victoria Stapley-Brown  http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/The-thcentury-gets-is-lustre-back-at-the-Louvre/32364

Q.  Which British football club is named after a Shakespeare character?  

A.  Tottenham Hotspur

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/10774983/Shakespeare-quiz-do-you-know-your-Bottom-from-your-Elbow.html

Tottenham Hotspur is a London-based professional football club playing in the English Premier League.  Founded in 1882 by pupils from a local grammar school, the club plays its home games at White Hart Lane in north London.  It is believed the club was named after local hero Sir Henry Percy, known as Harry Hotspur in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I.  Nicknamed ‘Spurs,’ Tottenham are famous for their cavalier style of attacking football, based on the club’s Latin motto ‘audere est facere,’ or ‘to dare is to do.’  

http://alexvoskou.over-blog.com/article-87182539.html

William Valentine "Bill" Shakespeare (1912–1974) was an American football player.  He played at the halfback position, and also handled punting, for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football teams from 1933 to 1935.  He gained his greatest acclaim for throwing the winning touchdown pass as time ran off the clock in Notre Dame's 1935 victory over Ohio State, a game that was voted the best game in the first 100 years of college football.  Shakespeare was selected as a consensus first-team All-American in 1935 and was posthumously inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983.  Sharing the same name as "The Bard of Avon", Shakespeare earned nicknames including "The Bard of Staten Island", "The Bard of South Bend", and "The Merchant of Menace."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare_(American_football)

Ten works of fiction indebted to the Bard by Sarah Gilmartin  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/shakespeare-words-words-words-1.1769905?page=1

The new National Museum of the Great Lakes opened to visitors for the first time on April 26, 2014.  The museum, at 1701 Front St. in Toledo, offers information on the Great Lakes that spans hundreds of years and includes tales of fur traders, rum runners and operators of the Underground Railroad, which helped escaped slaves reach freedom in Canada.  Museum visitors also can learn about the U.S. victory in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813 and the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter in Lake Superior in 1975.  The museum includes hundreds of artifacts and more than 40 interactive displays.  The Col. James M. Schoonmaker Museum Ship also is docked at the museum.  http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/04/28/great-lakes-museum-opens-on-toledo-riverfront.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1141  April 28, 2014  On this date in 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the Constitution of the United States.  On this date in 1789,  Mutiny on the Bounty:  Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors were set adrift.  On this date in 1792, France invaded the Austrian Netherlands (present day Belgium), beginning the French Revolutionary War.