How to be a man

The river of death has brimmed his banks And England’s far and Honour’s a name But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

Even as long ago as the first world war, men bitterly mocked the tritely jingo-istic sentiment of Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’. So it wouldn’t remotely surprise me if it turned out that I was the last chap on earth who still finds it an inspiration.

Yes, I know all that G.A. Henty stuff is discredited Victorian imperialistic tosh, but I still think our bewhiskered forebears grasped a point lost in our spavined, milksop era of kimchi, sourdough bread and ‘plant-based’ diets: a man really isn’t a man until he has been tested in the crucible of battle.

Winston Churchill certainly thought so. What’s striking about his early years, I’m reminded by Andrew Roberts’s stirring, thorough and impish biography, is just how frantically desperate he was to get himself almost killed on any number of occasions.