Young Churchill
Twentieth Century Victorian
Catch-up service:
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Yet Another Terrible Prime Minister
This week: what I learnt about Churchill’s singular, complex personality from reading his memoir; plus a gloriously capacious Rattle Bag of juicy links and notes including my thoughts on Nolan’s The Odyssey, the latest developments in politics, war, and AI; two types of confidence; why Dante > Shakespeare, and a banging new ad for gin. Sign up for a paid subscription for full access to all this and all previous and future paid posts.
Before he was a war leader and politician, Winston Churchill was a journalist and a soldier. Born to an aristocratic, wealthy family, he was nevertheless cash-poor, and funded the lifestyle to which he was accustomed by writing reports from the frontline of colonial wars in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa.
Newspapers paid a lot of money for them. Churchill was both a serving officer and reporter, a combination considered dubious even then but which gave his dispatches unquestionable authenticity. And he delivered great copy. His most famous reporting was on the episode that made him a huge celebrity at home and effectively launched his political career: his escape from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp. He later included an account of it in a memoir covering the first thirty or so years of his life, prosaically titled My Early Life.
Churchill wrote My Early Life in 1930, when in his mid-fifties. A few weeks ago at the Chalke History Festival, I picked up a copy at the Waterstones bookstore almost by accident and have unexpectedly found it to be one of my most enjoyable reads of the year. It’s not so much the accounts of battle which gripped me, well told as they are, but the writing and the insight it gives into the strange and compelling personality behind the icon.
