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Reader question: Please explain “finest hour”, as in this sentence: It’s drama; it’s comedy; it’s theater at its finest hour. My comments: Theater at its best. In other words, this drama or comedy is the best play you’ll see in any theater, anywhere, any time. Literally, “finest hour” means the best hour. There are 24 hours in a day, and the finest hour has to be the best hour, the moment when something happens that, well, makes your day. “Finest hour” is believed to be a term popularized by Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during the Second World War. Known, among other things, for his oratory skills, the war-time Prime Minister used these words in a speech (June 18, 1940) to rally British troops in face of invasion by Nazi Germany. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ | 
