May 3, 2025

Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, James W. Muller (ed.), St. Augustine’s Press, 2025, xlviii + 558 pages, $50. ISBN 978–1587315367

Review by Ted R. Bromund

When the Swedish Academy awarded Winston S. Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, it cited the works that justified the award. One was his monumental biography of his great ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough, which Leo Strauss described as “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding.” Also commended was Churchill’s oratory “defending exalted human values,” which Sigfrid Siwertz of the Academy praised for taking on “the character of great deeds.”

But the Nobel Committee was equally impressed by Churchill’s autobiography, My Early Life. So, it should have been, for My Early Life is not just the most readable of Churchill’s works. It is at once a great autobiography, a recollection of a youth fully lived in a by-gone age, and an adventure that seeks to inspire by example—and it is often very funny. In this new edition edited by James W. Muller, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, whose contributions to Churchill scholarship are themselves an inspiration, Churchill’s best-loved work finds new life in a volume that will delight the casual reader as much as it pleases those who wish to understand Churchill’s work in full.

To be a true autobiography, a volume must not merely relate the life and experiences of the author. The narrator of a biography is omniscient and, with luck, balanced. The narrator of a genuine autobiography, by contrast, lives at once in the moment and in retrospect, relating triumphs won and beliefs sincerely held, but also aware that—like Heraclitus’s stream—their life and beliefs have moved on. My Early Life is a triumph in part because, as Churchill puts it on his first page, he tries “to show the point of view appropriate to my years, whether as a child, a schoolboy, a cadet, a subaltern, a war-correspondent, or a youthful politician.”

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Those roles barely touch the surface of the adventure that was the young Churchill’s life. If he had, to the world’s great loss, perished in the Boer War—as he might easily have done—his life would still have been one of the great tales of the late Victorian Age. From fighting in close quarters on the borders of modern-day Pakistan, to leading a cavalry charge on the banks of the Nile River, to escaping from a Boer prisoner of war camp across hundreds of miles of African plain, to bicycling through Johannesburg while it was occupied by the Boer enemy, to offering his arm so a surgeon could cut the skin from his flesh to provide a graft for an injured brother officer, Churchill’s deeds beggar belief. So does his valor.

And yet it is all true—or at least, almost all true. As Muller comments, students reading My Early Life often believe it to be a work of fiction. There are indeed, as Muller makes clear, moments when Churchill errs, though almost without exception, the errors are minor—a date confused, a title wrongly rendered, a job progression bungled, or a name mistaken. But the main narrative of My Early Life is accurate, and even many minor details—like the color of the rat’s eyes in the South African mine where Churchill took refuge during his escape across the veld—were tested and found true by contemporary observations, all faithfully documented by Muller.

While Churchill’s beliefs do change over time—he clearly came to think slightly more highly of party discipline later in life—his innermost convictions remained fixed. For Churchill, the answer—as he said to himself as he strode away from the prisoner of war camp—was toujours de l’audace. Audacity always. He hated being a prisoner, he hungered for combat, for opportunity, for advancement, for money, for knowledge, for honor, and for fame, and he was willing to work astonishingly hard to win them all. As he put it, he was “eager for trouble.” A scion of the English aristocracy he may have been, and those connections—and his remarkable American mother—did help him, but Churchill was never one to be caught a-bed.

And he had what Napoleon valued most: he was lucky. As Churchill himself wrote, he rolled double sixes time and again. He was lucky in combat—his description of one of his final encounters with the Boers, where he was rescued at the last moment by a friendly scout, is one of his most evocative: “He came from the left, across my front; a tall man, with skull and crossbones badge, and on a pale horse. Death in Revelation, but life to me!” But he was lucky in other encounters too. The British ruling class was closer-knit in those days, which deepened the coming tragedy of the Western Front, but it eased Churchill’s path to adventure: he, and his mother, were more likely to know the few people who mattered.

Yet the roll call of British greats whom Churchill chanced to encounter is still remarkable. From politician Leo Amery (whom Churchill pushed into the pool at school), to future First Sea Lord David Beatty (who tossed a bottle of champagne to Churchill before the cavalry charge at Omdurman), to Lord Kitchener (of course, Churchill was chosen to report to him on the advance of the Dervishes), Churchill had the good luck to meet them all. True, he did not always make a good first impression; as he commented on his failure to arrive on time for dinner with the Prince of Wales, that was a moment to be “upon my best behavior: punctual, subdued, reserved, in short…all the qualities with which I am least endowed.” But his sheer pertinacity often won through.

One of Churchill’s most pleasing traits in My Early Life is his sense of humor. Most of his jokes—with the exception of the savaging he gives to General Sir Redvers Buller, a Boer War bungler—are at his own expense, and most of them are about his own ambition. Churchill was not a religious man in the conventional sense, and he drew heavily after his youth on his surplus in what he called the “Bank of Observance,” but he had a keen awareness of both fate and his own pushfulness. He believed in his star, but he was not above a joke about it. He also, as Muller notes, was not above fudging his chronology slightly to make himself look a bit less bumptious.

For all its youthful glee, there is in My Early Life an element of sadness, of a cherished era having passed forever. Churchill regretted the rise of unstructured democracy, swayed too wildly by the media and lacking principled leadership. Muller includes in this edition Churchill’s 1947 short story The Dream, in which Churchill’s father Lord Randolph comes back to life and shares a conversation with his son about the terrible events that had occurred since Lord Randolph’s death in 1895. The Dream illuminates one of the roots of Churchill’s ambition, in that it shows that even in 1947 he still painfully craved his father’s respect. It also hints at Churchill’s distrust of Joseph Chamberlain, who after destroying the Liberal Party over Home Rule for Ireland, turned about and destroyed the Conservative Party with his advocacy of tariff protection for the Empire. Trust the people, Lord Randolph and Winston both said—and democracy requires leadership, not demagoguery.

The work Muller—enormously aided by the late Paul H. Courtenay, many years a senior editor of Finest Hour—has done in preparing this edition of My Early Life is immense. As with Muller’s two-volume edition of Churchill’s The River War, to which he makes a suitably sly reference, he has footnoted every name and reference, documented every twitch of the text over multiple editions—and this time, he has added an excellent index. My Early Life was always compulsively readable, but its references were not always immediately comprehensible. Muller has remedied that, and done the job so thoroughly that no one will ever have to do it again. He has also restored a good deal of previously deleted material, including Churchill’s introductory note and US journalist Dorothy Thompson’s introduction to the 1939 American edition, as well as adding and footnoting The Dream, a haunting epilogue that gives some sense of how Churchill might have continued his story past 1902. What a loss to history, and to us, that he never did.

My Early Life is a tale of driving ambition, of tremendous luck, and of a young man who had the wit and the courage to make the most of both, in thought as well as in action. When he wrote, he knew the world had changed, but he still valued daring and was not daunted by failure. In dedicating his autobiography “To a New Generation,” Churchill tipped his hand. He wrote as always with a moral in mind and a purpose to hand. My Early Life is Churchill’s life, yes—but he wants to make it ours. In this new edition, his purpose—courageous, funny, thoughtful, and inspiring—shines through just as brightly as the great author intended.

Dr. Ted R. Bromund was a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and is founder of Bromund Expert Witness Services LLC, which provides expert witness testimony for victims of INTERPOL abuse.