The ghost of his father haunts Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’ Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.

There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life

Because My Early Life was published in 1930, there are many people, places, literary allusions, historical events and even words – nautch-girls, marplots, Uitlanders – that require explanation for today’s reader. Professor James W. Muller of the University of Alaska has produced no fewer than 1,450 editorial notes to the text, which explain everything. It is a feat of erudition and scholarship in which he was helped by the late Paul Courtenay.

There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life, written at a time when he felt that people were focusing too much on private concerns rather than public ones. It is a hymn to the sense of noblesse oblige that actuated him and many of his contemporaries. Some of the chapter titles brilliantly convey the adventures it recounts, including ‘The Sensations of a Cavalry Charge’, ‘I Escape From the Boers’ and ‘The Relief of Ladysmith’. Yet there is also a good deal of self-deprecation in the book, and little of the vainglorious boasting of which his modern detractors accuse him.