Ian Buruma - The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit

A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir

Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War

Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War

Year Zero: A History of 1945

Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents

The China Lover: A Novel

Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance

Conversations with John Schlesinger

Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Inventing Japan: 18531964

Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing

Anglomania: A European Love Affair

The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan

Playing the Game: A Novel

Gods Dust: A Modern Asian Journey

Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes

The Japanese Tattoo (text by Donald Richie; photographs by Ian Buruma)

It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come...

REV. JOSIAH STRONG, 1885

When the war is over we shall live in an Anglo-American world. There will be other great powers, but the sanctions on which the West reposes will be the ideas for which England and America have fought and won, and the machines behind them.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

I saw Winston Churchill. On my seventh birthday, in 1958. My grandparents took my younger sister and me to see Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre in London. When she wasnt too drunk to perform, Sarah Churchill played Peter. Quite often she played Peter while drunk as well. Once, she audibly said Fuck! when she landed awkwardly after flying across the stage unsteadily on a wire.

Nothing like that happened on the afternoon we attended the play. Or if it did, I cant remember. What I do recall is the moment Sarahs father arrived. The memory is a kind of audiovisual blur: a pale face in the spotlight, a pudgy hand emerging from a fur muff to make the V sign, and everyone around me, including my very patriotic British grandparents, breaking into wild applause. (The fur muff is a detail I know only from the photograph published in the papers the next day.) Being Jewish, my grandparents felt strongly that Churchill had saved their lives. The extraordinary enthusiasm of that moment, the shining eyes and the raucous cheering for an old man in a theater box, has stayed with me; it was a bit like watching adults behave like rowdy children, which fitted the story of Peter Pan in a way, the boy who never grew up.

I must have had only a very vague idea who Churchill was. But reminders of the war were still around us: waterlogged bomb craters all over London, drunken soldiers from the British Rhine army throwing up on the ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, and a steady diet of British comic books featuring dashing Spitfire pilots and beastly Germans. At home in The Hague, where I was born to a Dutch father, I assembled plastic Airfix models of Lancaster bombers. And British people we would meet at family parties in England still spoke to foreigners with the polite condescension that those who had lived through their finest hour still reserved for those who had been defeated.

Recent history was experienced by people of my ageI was born just six years after the warlargely as myth, in which Churchill played an important part. We were allowed a day off school to watch his funeral in black-and-white on television. This was just another reminder that we had been liberated from the Germans by people who spoke English. Canadians finished the job in the early spring of 1945, but American and British troops, as well as Canadians, had already entered the country from the south in 1944 and were dropped in the autumn of the same year along the Rhine in the disastrous Battle of Arnhem. Polish troops had played a heroic part, too, but this was not widely known. The language of freedom was English. Canadian troops were billeted in my paternal grandparents house in Nijmegen, near Arnhem. The women danced with their liberators to Glenn Millers In the Mood. Hershey bars and silk stockings were liberally distributed in return for favors, which in many cases might have been granted anyway. And it was never forgotten that in the hunger winter of 194445, British and American bombers dropped onto a starving population bags of flour, corned beef, margarine, and chewing gum.

My own perception of Europes liberation, like that of most people of my age, was largely shaped by the movies. Some of the most powerful cinematic memories bear little relation to artistic quality, or indeed historical accuracy. I still cannot watch The Longest Day, Darryl Zanucks Hollywood reenactment of the D-Day landings, without weeping. All the Anglo-American stereotypes are there: Robert Mitchum, the macho Yankee chomping on a cigar while leading his men onto Omaha Beach; Sean Connery as a plucky Scottish private; Peter Lawford as Lord Lovat, accompanied by his own bagpiperthe very idea of a bagpiper playing under German fire is enough to reduce me to tears; John Wayne, dropped from the sky over Normandy to sort things out; and Kenneth More, the unflappable Royal Navy captain wading through the surf with his bulldog named Winston.

If the ghost of Churchill hovered around my childhood in The Hague, its presence was felt even more keenly in Washington, DC, and it lingered far longer. Presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush and beyond have hoped to follow the great war leaders example and save the world for democracy. His was the heroic myth they felt they had to live up to.