Every week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books,

great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College

Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast.

gelsdale.edu or wherever you find your audio.

Morning, glory, at evening, Grace, America.

I'm Hugh Hewitt.

That music means the Hillsdale dialogue is underway.

Dr. Larry Arne is my guest this week as we plunge into this book, which is The Finest Hour,

Volume 2 of Winston Churchill's memoir of the Second World War.

And I have the modern paperback edition. There are many, many different editions.

So the pages that I reference may not be the pages that you reference.

But Dr. Arndt, we read every page of the Gathering Storm because it was so apropos of the time

we live in.

I don't know if we'll do every page in the finest hour.

I'm not sure we'll do volume 3, 4, 5, and 6.

But why is the finest hour different and unique and important among the other five volumes of memoirs?

Well, it's the peak. It's one of the turning points. Soza Nitson wrote a series of, of history books,

one of which still in the translation process. And he wrote about what

he called knots. That is to say, places where history comes together and everything changes.

And those knots tend to form around events that are very narrowly run, right, that it could

have gone the other way.

And so one of those happened in May through September of 1940.

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