Millard’s book tells of just one episode in his life. Aged 15, after a train journey, he wrote, “I won’t travel 2nd again, by Jove.” He lost his first election but, lacking a parliamentary seat, he spoke out for war from the steps of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace.Ĭhurchill as a reporter for the Morning Post during the Boer war. “I don’t like the fellow,” wrote Lt Gen Sir George White, “but he’ll be prime minister of England one day.” Churchill believed he was entitled to the best of everything. “This is a pushing age,” he wrote to his mother, and push he diligently did. To achieve it, he needed first to cover himself in military glory. He was already aiming for the highest political office. On British India’s north-west frontier he had gone into battle against the Pashtun, making himself conspicuous on a white pony bought, as he candidly told his brother, because it would “attract attention” if he rode about on it “when things looked a little dangerous”.Īttention, according to Candice Millard, was what Churchill was after. (He had also written and published two books.) He had narrowly escaped being shot in Cuba. He was only 24 at the time but the war in question, against the Boers, was the fourth he had attended. “T here has been a great deal too much surrendering in this war,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1899.
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